Stolen Childhood, Second Edition: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America

6. “ What has Ever become of my Presus little girl”: The Traumas and Tragedies of Slave Children and Youth

212 6 “What has Ever become of my Presus little girl” The Traumas and Tragedies of Slave Children and Youth Children have their sorrows as well as men and women; and it would be well to remember this in our dealings with them. Slave-children are children, and prove no exceptions to the general rule. Frederick Douglas During the 1970s a number of historical studies attempted to shift the attentionawayfromslaveryasthedismalabyssof “bullwhipdays”toanew analysisofthecommunityslavesinwhichtheyworkedfromsundownto sunup to mitigate the worst abuses of bondage. These studies provided a better understanding of how enslaved males and females faced tragedy and survived. But there is no denying that slavery generated enough traumas to adversely affect unfree persons of all ages. Corporal punishment , sexual abuse, and separation of loved ones were common. In the autobiographical Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,HarrietJacobswrote, “I have not exaggerated the wrongs inflicted by Slavery, on the contrary, my descriptions fall far short of the fact.” Similarly, Henry Bibb, a contemporaryofJacobswhowasborninShelbyCounty ,Kentucky,andwho also spent his formative years in slavery, wrote, “No tongue nor pen ever has or can express the horrors of American Slavery.”1 Slavery fostered an atmosphere similar to that of continuous warfare .Ononesideweretheenslavedpersons,whoneverstoppedtryingto escape from bondage or its invasive tentacles. On the opposite side were slaveholders, who never ceased trying to stop the folk they claimed to own from freeing themselves of slavery or its invasive tentacles. Within suchanarena,slaveholders,overseers,drivers,patrollers,employers,and “What has ever Become of my Presus little girl” 213 others intimidated or dispensed punishment in their attempts to control the chattel they owned, hired, apprenticed, or monitored. Enslaved children experienced the rancor of war that made them old before their time. Harriet Jacobs wrote that“the war of my life had begun” by the time she was fourteen years old, when her owner’s father began to harass her sexually. Sojourner Truth used similar language, “Now the war begun,” whenreferringtoherownordealsasanine-year-oldhouseservant.Their phrases suggest that the war analogy was not beyond the imagination of slave-born girls in the United States. Nor was it alien to other slaves, regardless of their gender and age or where they lived.2 One of the earliest uses of the war analogy by a former slave was Olaudah Equiano’s comment about the abduction and sale of resisting Africans in his The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, published in 1789. “When you make men slaves you deprive them of half their virtue,” he wrote. He added, “You set them in your own conduct an example of fraud, rapine, and cruelty, and compel them to live with you in a state of war.” Similar to Equiano’s comment is an observation by freeborn Lucy Stanton, an 1850 graduate of Oberlin Collegiate Institute, who affirmed, “Slavery is the combination of all crimes. It is war.” She explained,“Thosewhorobtheirfellow-menofhome,ofliberty,ofeducation , of life, are really at war against them.” Both Equiano and Stanton’s use of the war analogy removes it from the personal level to a larger historical context. It is clear that enslaved individuals were ready to fight the battle against slavery as long as the institution existed.3 Thischapterfocusesupontheheinousnatureofbondageandargues that children were not spared its bitterness. Moreover, it suggests that children were the most vulnerable members of the slave community due to their psychological and physical immaturity. This combination heightened their frustration and often made their resistance inconsequential since it did not change their status. Enslaved parents and others used their influence and shielded children whenever possible, but their leverage was often tenuous with owners, both white and nonwhite. A great amount of data about the treatment of slaves is from records of the whiteplanters.Thereisfarlessinformationaboutthetreatmentofslaves by African Americans, Native Americans, and small slaveholders in the North, South, and West. The paucity of sources makes it easier to imag- 214 Stolen Childhood ine that slaves owned by persons other than white planters were better treated,butactually“AmericanIndianslaveholders,”accordingtohistorian Fay Yarbrough, “differed little from other southerners in their treatment of slaves and in their practice of the institution of slavery.” Some Native American slaveholders were the descendants of white southeastern slaveholders, and they, like their ancestors and others, owned slaves for economic reasons and treated them accordingly.4 In the patriarchal style, slaveholders referred to their bondservants as family, but the treatment meted out to them was not comparable to that received by their own...