Children and Youth during the Civil War Era

2. “Train Up a Child in the Way He Should Go”: The Image of Idealized Childhood in the Slavery Debate, 1850–1870

| 29 2 “Train Up a Child in the Way He Should Go” The Image of Idealized Childhood in the Slavery Debate, 1850–1870 Elizabeth Kuebler-Wolf In the first half of the nineteenth century, the rise of sentimental domesticity and idealized childhood in American culture coincided with the intensification of sectional tensions over slavery. The effect of the slave system on children, in particular on white free children, had been a topic of interest to observers of the American slave system at least since Thomas Jefferson’s famous lament about slavery’s effect on master-class children in Notes on the State of Virginia (1781).1 By the mid-nineteenth century notions of slavery were so entwined with ideas of family that discussions of one aspect of the national culture was often embedded in any discussion of the other. Most famously, Uncle Tom’s Cabin deployed tropes of sentimental domesticity to argue that slavery effectively destroyed the cherished institution of family life and corrupted childhood’s innocence.2 Novelized responses to Uncle Tom’s Cabin used the same sentimental language to make exactly the opposite argument. Rather than destroying families , ruining children’s innocence, and making them violent, the argument went, childhood familiarity between slaves and masters resulted in adult relationships governed not by violence but by mutual affection. As more than one postbellum white Southerner would claim, “Above all, there was a strong attachment between the master and the servant, the natural result of closest association from childhood, which made cruelty foreign to the very nature of the owner.”3 In these “competing rhetorics of home and family,” childhood was central both as a rhetorical device and as a target of reform efforts.4 Antislavery forces typically depicted naturally innocent children who were irrevocably corrupted, damaged, and destroyed by slavery, while proslavery advocates represented childhood acculturation to slavery, for 30 | Elizabeth Kuebler-Wolf enslaved and free alike, as a necessary ingredient of a benevolent, hierarchical , organic plantation society.5 In the years immediately surrounding the Civil War, images of childhood produced on both sides of this debate over slavery’s effect on childhood reflect the influence of contemporary thought about childhood itself. In this essay I will consider three images that reflect the larger debate about slavery, in particular the alleged effects each side in the debate claimed that slavery had upon white children. While none of these three images was in wide circulation, it is important to consider them as evidence in an ongoing investigation into the rhetorical importance of childhood in American culture, just as we might treat diary entries or private letters as evidence of wider social attitudes. Images, like other texts, are governed by conventions, conditioned by the surrounding culture in which they are produced, and reflect both directly and indirectly the concerns of their creators and their social contexts. By treating images of all sorts as a type of historical “text” that can be dissected for rhetorical and ideological content, this essay argues that childhood was an important battleground for interpreting and understanding the effects of slavery and race on society in America in the years just before and well after the Civil War. David Claypoole Johnston (1799–1865), a prolific satiric cartoonist, weighed in on the antislavery side in 1863, when he produced a small watercolor titled The Early Development of Southern Chivalry. By this time, “Southern chivalry” was a term that could be understood to mean that the plantation system was an organic hierarchy that produced a tiered, family-like structure, akin to the grand manor houses of feudal England. Black dependents in this system may be enslaved, proslavery writers argued, but they were part of a structure that also produced caring , responsible, paternalistic masters. For defenders of the system, it was a good thing for children to be raised as slave owners, to be familiar with and therefore affectionate toward their dependents, and to learn early the burdens and responsibilities of mastery .6 Reverend C. K. Marshall addressed the Southern Convention at New Orleans in 1855 with a speech full of concern that Southern children were being ill served by having Northern teachers, Northern university educations , and Northern books to read. In Marshall’s opinion, “it was not possible for Southerners to be safely educated at the North. They cannot come back with proper feelings towards their families and their people” but, instead, “return to us…poisoned by fanatical teachings and influences against the institution of slavery.” In a further elaboration...