Stolen Childhood, Second Edition: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America

Introduction

xvii Introduction Most slave societies in the New World used massive importations of Africans to maintain their populations. The exception was the United States, which replaced its slave population through births. Less than 1,000,000 adults and children were imported into the country before the transatlantic trade in Africans ended in 1808. Although enslaved children fell into an “actuarially perilous category,” the population had increasedto3,952,760by1860.Ofthatpopulation,56percentwereunder twenty years old. The ability of the U.S. slave population to reproduce itself is the most distinctive feature of slavery in North America. This factor alone makes a study of enslaved children and youth important becausethemajorityofthoseinbondageintheUnitedStatesbythetime of the Civil War had been born in North America rather than in Africa. Theysurvivedtheinstitutionofslaverybecausetheirteachersdrewupon their own first-hand experiences in bondage to teach children survival skills. Enslaved persons used the deference ritual as a survival strategy.1 The purpose of this study is modest. Its aim is to extricate children and youth from the amorphous mass of bondservants. Placing them in the foreground will help answer questions about enslaved families in the nineteenth-century South.Framingquestionsabout youngsters and theirplaceintheslavecommunitywilladdressissuessuchasthosehighlighted by historian Willie Lee Rose in 1970. “The disturbing truth,” she wrote, “is that we know less than we ought to know about childhood in slavery”despitethe“significancepsychologistsandsociologistsattribute to experiences of infancy and youth in development of personality.”2 xviii Introduction Power in antebellum America rested in the hands of whites, many of whom viewed slaves, regardless of their ages, as children. In 1963, historian Stanley M. Elkins described the “Sambo” figure, which he attributed to southern lore. Elkins claimed that the relationship between slaveholders and slaves was marked by “[the slave’s] utter dependence and childlike attachment: it was indeed this childlike quality that was the very key to his being.” Even a hint of Sambo’s “manhood” would fill the slave-owner with scorn, while “the child, ‘in his place,’ could be bothexasperatingandlovable.”AftertheCivilWar,aformerslaveholder described her slaves, who had included an adult man and two women, as “like so many children to be clothed & nursed & fed & . . . constantly to be looked after.”3 The idea that persons of African descent were like gullible children prevailed into the twentieth century and prompted anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits to address it as the first of five misconceptions presented in his book The Myth of the Negro Past. The author summarized the details of the first myth: “Negroes are naturally of a childlike character, and adjust easily to the most unsatisfactory social situations, which they accept readily and even happily, in contrast to the American Indians, who preferred extinction to slavery.”OneofHerskovitz’sobjectiveswastodebunk such myths through presenting extensive research about Africans and theirdescendantsand contemporaryexamplesfromnationalistic movements in Africa. “For the Negro in the United States,” he wrote, “Ghana has become a symbol; in the face of the achievement of Africans, the distortions in the caricature of the Africans and their ways of life . . . no longer carry conviction to serious students.” Herskovits was clear in his conclusions that Africans and their descendants were neither childlike in their behavior nor credulous. Far from being “childlike” throughout their lives, slaves were forced to confront adult situations of work, terror, injustice, and arbitrary power at an early age.4 Surprisingly,thevolumeofpublishedworkonchildrenisquitelarge. Researchers in many disciplines, including women’s history, sociology, anthropology, labor history, the history of medicine, and literary criticism , have demonstrated an interest in the subject. One of the most ambitiousstudiesabouttheyoung ,Children and Youth in America,appeared in 1970. It is a massive work that includes white, African American, and Introduction xix Native American children, but it is a history of public policy for children rather than a history that deals with the realities of human growth and development. A more recent work edited by N. Ray Hiner and Joseph M. Hawes, Growing Up in America, comes nearest to studying children in a comprehensive manner. Other publications about the black family in America include discussions about slavery, but none of the studies emphasize the presence of youthful chattel.5 DataonslavechildrenexistingeneralstudiesofslaverysuchasJohn W. Blassingame’s The Slave Community, Herbert Gutman’s The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom,EugeneGenovese’sRoll, Jordan, Roll, Leslie Owens’s This Species of Property, and Thomas L. Webber’s Deep Like the Rivers, but they do not fully address many questions of interest, such as those related to child-rearing practices of nineteenth-century African Americans; relationships between children and their parents, siblings, and peers...