Slavery in American Children’s Literature, 1790–2010 by Paula T. Connolly (review)

Whereas Image of the Black Child in Children’s Fiction (1973), Telling Tales: The Pedagogy and Promise of African American Literature for Youth (1990), Domestic Abolitionism and Juvenile Literature, 1830–1865 (2003), Brown Gold: Milestones of African American Children’s Books, 1845–2002 (2004), Children’s Literature of the Harlem Renaissance (2004), Free within Ourselves: The Development of African American Children’s Literature (2007), Ebony Jr! The Rise, Fall, and Return of a Black Children’s Magazine (2008), and Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (2011) all address individual genres and themes important to the history of African American children’s literature, not until Paula T. Connolly’s superb Slavery in American Children’s Literature, 1790–2010 have scholars received a historical study of the construction and depiction of slavery in American children’s literature. By situating her work within “the nexus of children’s literature and racial mythmaking,” this groundbreaking text provides a critical and rigorously researched survey of “the visual and verbal literary aesthetics of race making” across two hundred years of American children’s literature (2).

Connolly chronologically presents her chapters, each divided further into three subsections in order to depict differing and often competing discourses of slavery within each of her five periods. The first two chapters cover the antebellum and Civil War periods of American history. In chapter 1, “Slavery Debates for Children, 1790–1865: Abolitionist Responses,” Connolly addresses three categories of abolitionist responses: radical, moderate, and conservative. Radical abolitionist texts were generally published by abolitionist organizations and presented a “nonnegotiable view of slavery as an unquestionably cruel system under which people suffered” (15). For instance, Noah Webster’s The Little Reader’s Assistant (1790), the earliest text of radical abolitionism, aimed to inspire young, white readers to active abolitionism by condemning slavery, depicting its violence, focusing on enslaved children, and asserting the child reader’s responsibility to fight against such injustices. Yet by providing paradigms of white heroism, these texts remain radical only when compared to less progressive texts. Moderate abolitionist literature, such as Samuel Goodrich’s Peter Parley books, offer a more geographically and emotionally distanced presentation of slavery, suggesting that such cruelties existed outside of the United States and that a slave could be happy with the right master (36). Conservative abolitionist literature, including William Taylor Adams’s Hatchie, the Guardian Slave (1853) and John Townsend Trowbridge’s Cudjo’s Cave (1864), advocates a gradualist approach to abolition by emphasizing the supposed danger of immediate and total emancipation on white Americans. This literature encouraged child readers to help educate—not liberate—slaves of white values. Further, implicit in all three tiers of abolitionist children’s literature is a hierarchy of white characters that remained prevalent throughout the next two centuries of depictions of slavery in children’s literature.

Chapter 2, “Slavery Debates for Children, 1830–1865: Proslavery Responses,” explores the proslavery refutation of abolitionist children’s literature through its representation of the idyll plantation and instruction of management. After reminding readers of the “Northerners who agreed with slavery” and how “pockets of rebellion by white citizens—such as in Jones County, Mississippi—revealed violent disagreements about slavery and secession,” Connolly explains in what manner “Plantation Stories” idealized the plantation as a protected and harmonious place of civility (52). For instance, The Rose Bud (1832–1833), the first children’s magazine published in the South, established how such stories would encourage proper slave management. Described as the most popular genre of Southern children’s literature, “Proslavery Adventures,” such as Francis Robert Goulding’s Robert and Harold; or, The Young Marooners on the Florida Coast (1852) offered a Robinson Crusoe-like tale for white children of slave holding families. These proslavery novels offered a counter point to the heroic, black slaves embodied by Douglass in Heroic Slave and George in Uncle Tom’s Cabin by revisioning slavery as play. Deserted islands function as microcosms of slavery where young characters and readers are assured...