"Let Her White Progeny Offset Her Dark One": The Child and the Racial Politics of Nation Making

In his famous critique of slavery, Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes (1754), John Woolman emphasizes the colonies' arbitrary but entrenched association of slavery with "colour" by asking readers to consider the plight of a child. The child to whom Woolman draws his readers' attention is a white child who, abandoned on the death of its parents, comes under the power "of a person, who endeavours to keep him a slave."¹ According to Woolman, the image of an enslaved white child provokes outrage in those otherwise untroubled by the "many black [people who] are enslaved" because slavery is generally "connected with the black colour, and liberty with the white" (CKN, 59). Woolman uses a child to argue that the "false" belief in essential racial difference that "through the force of long custom" has been used to justify slavery undermines the colonies' abiding commitment to "liberty" (CKN, 58–59). Over a hundred years later, as the nation went to war to determine the fate of slavery within its borders, the popular carte de visite "Rosa, Charley, and Rebecca: Slave Children from New Orleans" (1864) used the child to raise the same question: How can a nation that is, as Lincoln asserts in the Gettysburg Address, "conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal," condone slavery? (see fig. 1).² Not so much protecting the three seemingly white children it cloaks as indicating their vulnerability to the institution of slavery the nation continues to countenance, the American flag here symbolizes the contingency, rather than unprecedented ascendancy, of freedom in the new nation, and the disjunction between the children's racial identity and the color of their skin makes palpable the final inadequacy of race to justify slavery in a nation founded upon freedom.

As these exemplary representations suggest, the child that was consistently featured in a wide range of political tracts and popular narratives from the Revolutionary era to the Civil War operated as an important ideological site for representing the shifting conceptual place of race in the new nation. Jay Fliegelman, Russ Castronovo, and Ronald Takaki, among others, have documented how the colonies' political separation from Britain was compared to a child's inevitable separation from its parent and thus how the child became a powerful icon of a new nation in U.S. political rhetoric.³ However, these repeated representations of the child did more than contribute to a coherent narrative of the nation's origin. As Woolman's Considerations and the image of "Rosa, Charley, and Rebecca" make clear, they also registered the extent to which this narrative had been shot through with a racial subtext that constantly threatened to undermine, even as it enabled, a unified account of U.S. nation formation. The white child featured in so many political texts, therefore, not only represented a coherent narrative of the nation's political origin, which was subsequently challenged in the antebellum era by black as well as by white social commentators, but also registered in its representation of race the inherently fractured and contradictory nature of the nation it exemplified.⁴ In so doing, the child functioned as a particularly rich discursive site authorizing a distinct national identity and, in its depiction of the integral, complicating place of "colour" in that identity, revealing the conceptual instabilities embedded in the nation since its inception.

The child's capacity to represent race as both constituting and undermining U.S. national identity deserves particular attention at the current critical moment when a wealth of scholarship has, on one hand, identified the centrality of race to...