Abstract

Children's literature published in the United states during the 1820s contributed significantly to a common cultural understanding among nineteenth-century whites of African Americans as cheerful dependents when treated with kindness and dangerous rebels when abused. In this fiction, representations of black adults as childlike figures grateful to their masters for taking care of them helped to defuse fears of black violence but also suggested that people of African descent did not deserve the same political and legal rights that white citizens possessed. Since children of the 1820s grew up to be the adults of the Antebellum period, these texts played an important role in shaping how white Americans engaged in and responded to the contentious debate over slavery and the place of African Americans in society as the civil war approached.

American authors of the 1850s perpetuated the same racial themes found in children's literature of the early nineteenth century in the novels they wrote to condemn or to defend the slave system. Like juvenile literature of the 1820s, these texts infantilized African Americans to make them seem unthreatening to white readers. As debates over slavery heated up, however, antislavery authors of the 1850s began to turn to light-skinned slave characters to elicit sympathy from a mainly white audience. While such a literary strategy persuaded some Americans of the injustice of a system that held whites in bondage, it failed to promote the cause of full citizenship for all African Americans.

pdf

Share