-
Part I: Children and the Sectional Conflict
- NYU Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
| 11 Part I Children and the Sectional Conflict You know that, if you break a small wheel in a cotton-mill, the entire machinery will stop; and if the moon—one of the smallest lumps of matter in the universe—shall fall from its orbit, the whole planetary system might go reeling and tumbling about like a drunken man. So you see the great importance of little things,—and little folks are of much greater importance than little things. —Edmund Kirke, “The Boy of Chancellorsville”1 As indicated in this passage from a supposedly true story, told by Edmund Kirke, of a brave drummer boy who survives the Battle of Chancellorsville and a stint in Libby Prison, Civil War–era writers for children stressed that even youngsters had a role to play in the great events of the day. The essays in this part show how children and youth became both exemplars and, at times, actors in the racial and political issues of the sectional conflict that led to war. The war and the decades preceding it were a pivotal moment not only in the nation’s development but also in the ways in which children and youth were integrated into that development. Slavery was a major battleground between the new and old conceptions of childhood. Indeed, it may have represented the most violent clash between developing notions of innocent children and protected childhood and political and economic reality. One of the greatest ironies of this particular time and place is the fact that, even as affluent white children in the South actually benefited from this new version of childhood, the plight of slave children mocked the idea that childhood should reflect a period of safety and simplicity . Although the rural nature of the South, along with somewhat different attitudes about gender, class, and hierarchy, continued to influence childrearing practices, many southern families also sought to protect and nurture their children. But new ideas about children and child rearing were layered 12 | Part I. Children and the Sectional Conflict over older ones; for instance, just as slave children had to learn how to be slave adults, so, too, did white children living in a slave society have to learn how to navigate their status as racial superiors, whether or not they were slave owners. In a larger sense, the practice of enslaving children became a central component of both the abolitionist attack on slavery and the slave owners’ defense of the institution. Rebecca de Schweinitz and Elizabeth Kuebler-Wolf articulate and creatively address the rich ironies in the rise of sentimental childhood even as the decidedly unsentimental rearing of slave children flourished. The young men in Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai’s essay were the scions of some of those New England families raising the first generation of children nurtured in “modern” child-centered families. Perhaps that gave them the confidence to engage the political issues of the day, to challenge the teachers —and, in one case, their college president—and even their parents as the nation whirled toward civil war. Like young southern men of their generation , they challenged the status quo even as they sought ways to take roles in the rising conflict. The slave children who appear in these essays are less real people than useful symbols of the northern critique and the southern defense of slavery . Yet the issues they represented engaged actual northern college students, who wrote about and acted on the issues raised by the sectional conflict. Perhaps they perceived the disjunction between their own protected childhoods and those of the slave children they had not met. In any event, they saw themselves as political actors perfectly capable of taking part in the great debates of the day. In their own ways, young slaves in the South and privileged young men in the North displayed, to paraphrase Edmund Kirke, the “great importance” of heretofore ignored segments of society. Notes 1. Edmund Kirke, “The Boy of Chancellorsville,” Our Young Folks 1 (September 1865): 600. ...