Slavery in American Children's Literature, 1790-2010

Introduction

1 Introduction One of the marveylous thynges that god useth in the composition of man, is coloure: whiche doubtlesse can not bee consydered withowte great admiration in beholding one to be white and an other blacke; beinge coloures utterlye contrary. —The Decades of the Newe World (1555)1 I n 1619, after surviving capture and separation from their families, removal from their homelands, and forced transportation across the Atlantic, twenty Africans were sold to newly arrived colonists in Jamestown, Virginia. As the colonies developed, so too did slavery: by 1660, slavery was written into Virginia statute law and within little over a century later, the enslaved population across the colonies had increased to five hundred thousand. That population, deriving both from those kidnapped from Africa and others born in the Americas, continued to grow. Following the Revolutionary War—and despite the war’s prefacing document avowing that “all men are created equal”—slavery became more socially, politically, and legally entrenched in the southern states, where the number of enslaved people would rise to nearly four million by 1861, just shortly before the Civil War.2 For the millions of people brought to or born in America as slaves during those nearly two and a half centuries, there was little hope of manumission. Beyond those fairly generalized facts, what slavery essentially meant in terms of its conditions, the experiences of those held under slavery, and the implications of race was highly contested. As politicians, scientists, and theologians debated racial hierarchies and slavery, antebellum literature entered the national discourse by framing contemporary theories with competing versions of “the peculiar institution” and those living under it, translating the anonymous generalization of “slave” into specific figures whom readers could variously admire, pity, laugh at, fear, or disdain. Called by one slavery advocate “the most powerful weapon” (“Duty” 242), literature—including both autobiography and fiction—was used by writers on all sides to justify their various positions, counter op- Introduction 2 posing arguments, and garner popular, and thereby political, support for their cause. But if literature in general was “the most powerful weapon” in the battle to engender sympathy for one’s position about slavery, children’s literature was an indispensable tool in that ideological arsenal. Indeed, children’s literature and the figure of the child functioned centrally in debates about slavery, as they have in the literary and visual re-­ creation of slavery to the present day. Slavery in American Children’s Literature situates itself within this nexus of children’s literature and racial mythmaking in America. Providing a literary history of over two hundred years of American children’s literature, it examines the visual and verbal literary aesthetics of race making. Part recovery project, this study examines both well-­known works and others that have ostensibly disappeared from contemporary cultural knowledge, but have nonetheless affected the American social consciousness in the creation and reiteration of racialized images. Interrogating how generations of U.S. children have been educated about slavery can tell us much, both about the development of the nation’s racial debates and how literature has historically reframed existing tropes about slavery. This book thus is a study of the literary and cultural antecedents upon which current representations of slavery rest. At the same time, it examines how historical memory is reshaped to express contemporaneous racial politics. Examining children’s literature about slavery ultimately provides an opportunity to explore notions of “American” identity, particularly in terms of who is or is not literarily enfranchised , as object and/or subject, and intra- and/or extranarratively. As literature teaches each successive generation what race means, it also teaches children what their function is in terms of race, citizenship , and personhood. • • • When, in 1788, Noah Webster wrote that the “only practicable method to reform mankind, is to begin with children,” he was arguing the political implications—for him, the political necessity—of children’s early education (“On the Education” 22, spelling modernized throughout). His assertion that the “education of youth is, in all governments, an object of the first consequence,” in that “the impressions received in early life, usually form the characters of individuals ; a union of which forms the general character of a nation” (1), aptly captured widely held beliefs about the moral, intellectual , and political implications of children’s education. In political 3 Introduction terms, the child represented the young republic’s hope for a strong future, his success ensuring the...