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213 Notes Introduction 1. Francisco López de Gómara, in Peter Martyr (D’Anghera), The Decades of the Newe Worlde. . . . , trans. Richard Eden (London, 1555), reprinted in Edward Arber, ed., The First Three English Books on America . . . (Birmingham , UK, 1885) qtd in Jordan 7. 2. For population numbers, see Kolchin 991. Kolchin notes that throughout the antebellum years, one of every three people in the South was classified as a slave. Also see Gutman 340 and Curtin, especially chapter 1, who discusses the problems of ascertaining accurate statistics. Jordan, chapter 2, discusses early slavery in the colonies. 3. See MacLeod, especially chapters 1–2, for a discussion of education as “an indispensable protection for the Republic” (26). Avery and Murray provide important studies of early American children’s literature. Also see Levander , who discusses the intersection of the child and nationhood, particularly regarding issues of race. 4. Throughout this study, I use “America” and “United States” as synonyms; in this context, “America” specifically refers to post- 1788 literature authored and published in the United States. Because I seek to examine representations that reflect an American consciousness about race, I intentionally confine my discussion of children’s texts to those authored and published in the United States (although some of those were also exported, published, or read abroad) as a way to distinguish a specifically “American” children’s literary tradition. 5. “Juvenile Anti- Slavery Society” (1837), which comprises an entire issue of The Slave’s Friend, models a “Constitution” for young antislavery activists. See Keller and Crandall, both of whom discuss how children were fictionally and socially constructed as “agents of reform” (Keller 86). Keller focuses on abolitionism, while Crandall provides a discussion of several reform movements that solicited children’s attention, slavery being the most controversial. Also see De Rosa, Domestic Abolitionism, chapter 4, for further information on juvenile abolitionists. 6. Davis and Gates have described the slave narrative and its “narrative antithesis,” the plantation novel, as “locked together in a bipolar moment, as it were, or signifying relationship” (xvii). I add to that by pointing out the impact of the white- authored abolitionist novel. By contrast, the antebellum black- authored novel—as seen in Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave (1853), William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853), and Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859)—is more closely aligned to the slave narrative in rhetorical stance, presentation of slavery, and images of race. 214 Notes to Pages 6–17 7. About the curse of Noah, see Gossett, Race, 5; Fredrickson 60–61, 87–88; and its origins in Genesis 9:25. For a discussion of race theories, see Gossett, Race, chapters 1–4; Watson 35–46; Jordan, especially chapters 1 and 6; and Fredrickson, chapters 1–3. Gossett points out that the number of races identified by early anthropologists ranged from three to sixty- three, with debates about the definitions of “species” and “races” making the matter all the more confused. One early anthropologist, for example, divided humans into “two ‘species,’ each containing three races” while another defined “seventeen races and thirty types” (82). Gossett argues how, in a Darwinian paradigm, “races were thought to represent different stages of evolutionary scale with the white race—or sometimes a subdivision of the white race—at the top” (144). 8. See Fredrickson, especially chapter 2, where he points out that “when politicians justified slavery, they almost invariably did so largely in terms of race” (68). 9. For examples of this in literature for adults, see discussions in Burnham; Samuels; and Morrison. Chapter 1 1. About Child’s abolitionist writings, and particularly their effect on the Juvenile Miscellany, see Karcher, especially chapter 8; Mills, chapter 2; MacCann , White Supremacy 51–55; MacLeod 33–37; and Murray 46–47. 2. In White Supremacy in Children’s Literature, Donnarae MacCann delineates “reformist” and “cautious” abolitionist writers for children and points out that “the storytellers were spread across the political spectrum: radicals were agitating for emancipation, and conservatives were cautioning that the antislavery movement was ‘extremist’” (22). 3. As Davis and Gates have argued, the slave narrative “represents the attempts of blacks to write themselves into being” (xiii) in a society that sought their virtual obliteration. Over a hundred narratives were published by the close of the Civil War, and many reached what one could term “best- seller” status, enjoying repeated reprintings and appreciable sales. See Davis and Gates 319–330 for a bibliography of narratives; Olney, regarding common characteristics of the genre; and Andrews...