Judging the Bodies of Children: Racial Science and Double Age as Legal Strategy in the Early United States

Beginning in 1841, a relatively obscure British surgeon named Dr. John Roberton wrote to two Moravian missionaries stationed in Antigua and Jamaica. Roberton wanted data from the two men, specifically, the age at which the enslaved Black females in their care had their first period. "I should be glad to learn the ages at which fifty or even so few as twenty negresses arrived at puberty," Roberton requested. He also explained that "the age when the menses appeared . . . will generally be easy to find, as nearly every woman can tell regarding this point for herself, but . . . when practicable, should receive corroboration from the testimony of a mother, a sister, or other female relation or friend."¹

A few months later, the missionaries replied, a little confused about what Roberton wanted but provided the requested information on twenty-one enslaved females, nonetheless. Roberton immediately published the results of his study, which concluded that puberty occurred on the same age scale, regardless of climate or race. Roberton intended for his study to correct a long-standing misconception about the relationship between one's environment, race, gender, and age of puberty.² This was because in the mid-eighteenth century, Albrecht Von Haller, a Swiss climate theorist, linked sexual precocity to heat.³ According to early modern Western medicine, female bodies were warmer and moister than males; therefore, the more humid the climate, the quicker the female reproductive system developed.

Well into the nineteenth century, physiologists continued to teach Haller's theory and assigned expected ages of puberty based on their understanding of geographic difference. Medical books stated "that in warm climates" puberty occurred "often as early as the eighth or ninth year; in temperate climates" puberty was "usually postponed to the thirteenth or fourteenth year; and in arctic regions to the nineteenth or twentieth year."⁴ Although Von Haller, writing in the 1760s, focused on climate and heat as the accelerant, race-conscious Americans strategically viewed the word climate as interchangeable with race.⁵

Von Haller might have popularized the medical discussion of puberty as a major transitional moment for young bodies, but it was not until the early nineteenth century that socially this transition really began to matter.⁶ Along with age laws came new expectations of how white children should experience their childhoods. Widespread schooling led to increased age segregation and distinct spheres and locations in which children were to operate as separate from adults.

Part of the reason this debate about age of puberty resurfaced at this particular moment was a rising concern about the impact that crowded cities and factory work had on young white bodies—in other words, how artificial climates might unnaturally slow or speed up the process of puberty. One particular fear was that young white girls working in hot, steamy factories would achieve sexual maturity younger than they should.⁷

This period of American industrialization was marked by the intensification of defining and legislating racial difference. Gradual emancipation in the North, the expansion of the domestic slave trade in the South, increased migration, religious upheavals, and financial panics set off a dizzying array of change for early Americans. Literacy rates and print culture also exploded at this time, which provided the average reader unprecedented access to new ideas about race, gender, childhood, the human body, class, and family, among other topics.

One way that white Americans coped with the stress from these sociocultural upheavals was to redefine the transition to adulthood as exclusively based on age. Through their use of age laws, those in power created stable benchmarks to indicate a child's ability, especially to be a reliable witness, consent to contracts, or be culpable for crimes. At the same time, white Americans rallied around the belief that children were inherently innocent and in need of protection while simultaneously continuing to enslave and exploit children of color. To justify this incongruity, white Americans eagerly adopted racial science that argued children of color developed and matured quicker than white children.

Despite Roberton's 1842 study, nineteenth-century lawyers...