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204 12 left behind but getting ahead Antebellum Slavery’s Orphans in the Chesapeake, 1820–60 calvin schermerhorn Enslaved children left behind in the antebellum Chesapeake faced an unforgiving landscape of challenges as their parents were sold off to the cotton plantations of the Deep South. Forced separations orphaned countless youngsters, as slaveholders broke up, through sales, one in three marriages among the people they owned each decade between 1820 and the onset of the American Civil War in 1861. Slaveholders hired other spouses away at considerable distances and converted one in five enslaved people of any age into cash. Children witnessed thefts of fathers, dislocations of mothers, and the scattering of siblings, uncles, aunts, and cousins. In one of the largest forced migrations in modern history the market prized the fit and the fertile, which left children behind, bereft, but—as children—also innocent to the systemic implications of their losses. Though these children experienced extreme domestic instability, were raised by grandparents or other kin or caregivers, and could themselves expect to be hired out alone at early ages, often at a distance, they made what they could of their abandonment. Children responded spontaneously by forming substitute networks of caregivers among the enslaved. Their initial bewilderment and senses of loss of one or both parents gave way to strategies to recruit others who could care for them. In the many additional cases where the young orphaned slaves were the products of white paternity and its corollary—the absence of a father in a position to act as a caregiver—the challenges were not diminished. But, rather than viewing the resulting social landscape as a dystopia of damaged psyches and scarred souls, we can antebellum slavery’s orphans in the chesapeake 205 see how pain and loss stimulated strategies for survival and even the building blocks of successful social reproduction, even if the means these children adopted did not match the norms of the intact nuclear families that other social groups around them were able to maintain. Each generation retained elders—like grandparents—who could take part in caring for babies of absented parents. Fathers and mothers remarried after their loss of a spouse, children gained stepsiblings and became stepchildren, and extended families provided child care. Enslaved children developed acute awareness of interpersonal situations and honed abilities to judge character and reliability among potential caregivers, all while realizing the pain of separation. There was not therefore a yawning gap between enslaved children, who could lose caregivers at any moment, and enslaved orphans. Even under severe constraints, children matured, formed lasting relationships, or at least continued to search for new connections with the potential to endure.1 By the mid-nineteenth century, childhood was just beginning to enter the cultural lexicon of middle-class Americans as an organic stage of development , and it would take another century for scientific theories of the concept to be fully articulated and for a culture of childhood to take shape. For the working classes, childhood meant a stage of preparation for a working life characterized by assisting in household, field, or even in wage-earning industrial production. Against that broad background, this chapter offers a historical assessment of the particular challenges that enslaved children faced and their responses. Since the early twentieth century, psychoanalytic or psychosexual theories stressing stages of child development have competed with cognitive theories stressing distinctively childlike patterns of thought. Behavioral approaches to child development have explained children ’s behavior with reference to environmental influences or inputs, and social development theories have located the vital importance of stable and trusting relationships with parental of other caregivers in shaping one’s social relationships throughout later life. It would be tempting to use the analytical tools of the last and current centuries to peer speculatively into the psyches of enslaved children in the nineteenth century and to ascribe pathologically effaced childhoods, brutally taken away by slaveholders, to the children they owned. However, it is difficult, if not impossible, to use twenty-first-century psychological tools and categories to read trauma and disorders back onto children of the nineteenth. It would be anachronistic (and perhaps teleological) thus to assume that enslaved children somehow anticipated a socially constructed childhood that slaveholders stole. Some scholars studying the effects of slavery on the sociology of African American families have attributed 206 calvin schermerhorn chronic social pathologies to slavery’s legacy. Families destroyed by these forced separations, according to this interpretation, had ramifications far beyond the orphans created by...

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