Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America is a 1995 history book about nineteenth century slave children in America by Wilma King. As the first full-length book on the subject, it began the scholarship of slave childhood. The book uses historical documents to argue that enslaved children were deprived of experiences now understood to constitute childhood, due to early work responsibilities, frequent bodily and emotional trauma, and separations from family. The book covers themes of the children's education, leisure, religion, transitions to freedmen, and work expectations. It was published in the Indiana University Press's Blacks in the Diaspora series, and a revised edition was released in 2011.
Critics regarded Stolen Childhood positively for taking the historiography of children, slavery, and education in an unexplored direction. Scholars placed the book in a lineage of studies on slave families and women, with King's book as the first dedicated to slave children. Reviewers generally praised her research contribution but condemned the book's structure and repetitive style. The book won the 1997 Outstanding Book Award from the National College of Black Political Scientists. Choice named King's 2011 revised edition an "outstanding title" for academic libraries.
Overview
Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America broadly[3] documents nineteenth century slave children and their lives.[4] It was the first full-length book on the subject,[5][6] and at the time of its publishing, the topic of enslaved children was underrepresented in American slavery scholarship.[7][8] The book is part of Indiana University Press's Blacks in the Diaspora series,[8][notes 1] and was first published in 1995, with a revised edition in 2011.[10] King taught history at Michigan State University when the first edition was released.[11]
King argues that enslaved children did not have the opportunities for childhood[12] and thus, did not have childhoods.[7][10] Slave children instead worked as soon as they could,[3] were often separated from caregivers and family, and were subject to punishment of many sorts,[12] sometimes no different than those levied on adults.[5] The children's trauma was compared to that of war—enduring abuses, sexual exploitation, inability to protect themselves—and they aged prematurely through these experiences.[3]
The second edition doubles the book's length. It uses new material and demography, includes northern enslaved children and those in urban centers, details relations between free and enslaved children, tells of child abolitionists, and shows child life under black and Native American slaveowners.[13] Forty percent of the original volume was notes.[5]
The book's eight[notes 2] chapters address prominent themes affecting slave children, including education, leisure, religion, transitions to freedmen, and work expectations.[10] Due to a lack of historical sources direct from children, the book focuses more on their socialization and stories of survival than their internal perspectives.[14] King's evidence includes slave narratives, ex-slave interviews collected by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), plantation owner diaries, census records,[10] newspapers,[5] autobiographies, missionary reports, and Freedmen's Bureau records.[15] She contrasts Northern and Southern slave life, as well as their ownership by whites, blacks, and Native Americans.[10]
King shows how enslaved children were educated for survival and resistance.[12] This education was usually informal and parental[14] and taught how to deal with slaveowners and their abuse.[3] King also named literacy and religion's role in their education. Kids were taught mutual cooperation as a virtue between slaves.[16] Few slaves had formal education and those who did were artisans. Those educated or given religious training were only by the fortune of their owner's interests.[7] King's stories tell of children in domestic, farm, and industrial work,[13] who spent their free time in celebrations, dances, games, folk rituals,[12] and hunting.[16]
When unoccupied, the children tended to their own needs and played with toy marbles and hobby horses. Some learned to count by playing hide and seek.[17] Play was primarily for inculcating virtuous traits like courage and loyalty,[16] but it also made life more tolerable.[6] Black and white children played together before the age of ten, but separated afterward based on the demands of work.[16] Children often helped the adults,[17] and performed chores (like fetching wood or water) that quickly escalated into full work responsibilities.[7]
The children's degree of freedom depended on the mother's status. Their names were chosen in conjunction with the owners, who often lent their own surnames as slave names while families gave children African "day names".[17] Slaveowner events were used to control the slave population, with a doubling social function for purposes of courtship.[16] King emphasizes the role of the children in motivating families to reunite once free,[8][17] though many made new families.[12] The dependency of children also urged families to become financially independent.[8] Slave children were generally in bad health with bodies smaller than usual. They frequently died young.[18]
The volume continues briefly through the postwar period, where harsh experiences persisted even after slavery ended.[3] For example, Black Codes apprenticeship laws were a means for former slave owners to own the labor of the formerly enslaved children.[15] Other topics covered in the book include gradual abolition,[10] parental teachings,[4] pregnancy,[16] and the importance of the family.[12]
Reception
Stolen Childhood was regarded as a critical contribution to the historiography of children, slavery, and education.[16] The book won the 1997 Outstanding Book Award from the National College of Black Political Scientists.[19]Choice marked the second edition as an "outstanding title" for academic libraries.[13]
Stolen Childhood was seen to open the study of slave childhood.[3][8][16] Multiple reviewers placed the book in a lineage of studies on slave families and women,[3][6][15] alongside works such as Herbert Gutman's The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925.[3] V. P. Franklin noted that these works mentioned slave childhood, but that King's book delved into the topic.[15] Jane Turner Censer, writing for The American Historical Review, traced the field to Willie Lee Rose's 1970 "Childhood in Bondage" through a half-dozen related historians of slave families.[6] Marie Jenkins Schwartz in The Journal of Southern History expected King's study of childhood to fill a "large gap" in the lineage's literature.[3] Thomas J. Davis summed the work as a "pioneering survey" in Library Journal.[20]
Marie Jenkins Schwartz praised King's use of primary sources, passion for the topic, and photographs, but lamented the original release's lack of child psychological perspective and exactitude of parental involvement in their children's enslavement. She also criticized its "abrupt" postwar ending.[3] James Marten also found the section rushed in The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society.[21] Jane Turner Censer pointed to Brenda Stevenson's connection between slaves' brutal treatment and their force used on children as missing from the volume. As for its originality, she also said the book held "few surprises for historians of slavery".[6] Joshua D. Rothman noted the same in the Journal of the Early Republic.[14] Franklin, writing for History of Education Quarterly, preferred the sections on the unique realities facing these children, such as their relation to puberty and courting, and was not as interested in comparisons between slave children and adults. He bemoaned the original release's organization for only occasionally discussing these practices, and suggested organization by social practices instead of by activity to reduce redundancy.[15] Censer[6] and Marten also complained of this repetition.[21] In The New York Times, Douglas A. Sylva thought the book suffered from weak style and structure, with good research lost in vague topic sentences and conclusions.[11] Franklin additionally noted insufficient citation of relevant secondary literature and recommended a harsher edit,[15] while Loren Schweninger upheld the book's citation quality and accounted for all "important secondary source[s]" on slavery in the back matter.[5]
Ben Neal of the Tennessee Librarian questioned King's heavy use of Works Progress Administration-collected interview material, noting that the interviewees were too old to thoughtfully recall and express the complete spectrum of slave childhood. He then absolved King of fault for the otherwise dearth of data. Neal praised the book's accessibility for casual readers and academics alike.[10] In The Journal of American History's review of the first edition, Loren Schweninger commended King's restrained use of the WPA sources with Neal’s same rationale. Schweninger also sought more comparisons between Southern regions and in interracial relationships.[5] Jane Turner Censer agreed that the book treated the South and century too broadly where it could have noticed specific differences due to migration patterns, regional changes, and time.[6] Richard H. Steckel in The Georgia Historical Quarterly similarly desired comparison between slave and working-class children of the era.[7] Yet Roderick A. McDonald appreciated this broader perspective and emphasis on slave resilience and familial love in foil with two more negative and detailed, or narrower, studies (Them Dark Days by William Dusinberre and Life in Black and White by Brenda Stevenson) in his write-up for American Studies.[22] Steckel added that he wanted to know more about the children's nutrition,[7] and Marten felt several of King's smaller points were not fully substantiated.[21]
Writing for Choice on the second edition, J. D. Smith recalled "rave reviews" for the original release and credited the book with making King "a leading scholar on African American slavery generally and ... an authority on slave youth culture".[13] Smith described the book as "indispensable"[13] and Steckel declared it "essential reading" for specialists in related fields.[7] George M. Fredrickson in The New York Review of Books named the book with Norrece T. Jones' as "a little-noticed countertrend to ... culturalist approaches", and so underscored the sheer brutality of slave life after an age of literature that suggested other methods for understanding the slave-master relationship.[18] Many reviewers recommended the book for scholarly libraries.[10][12][20]
↑ Indiana University Press's Blacks in the Diaspora series ran for 17 years with over 40 titles, mainly as tenure books for black women scholars on topics in black women's studies.[9]
↑ Hine, Darlene Clark (2008). "Becoming a Black Woman's Historian". In White, Deborah Gray (ed.). Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. p.55. ISBN9781458722911.
↑ McDonald, Roderick A. (Fall 1998). "THEM DARK DAYS: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps by William Dusinberre; STOLEN CHILDHOOD: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America by Wilma King; LIFE IN BLACK AND WHITE: Family and Community in the Slave South by Brenda E. Stevenson". American Studies. 39 (3). Mid-America American Studies Association: 191–193. ISSN0026-3079. JSTOR40642990.
The Atlantic slave trade or transatlantic slave trade involved the transportation by slave traders of enslaved African people to the Americas. European slave ships regularly used the triangular trade route and its Middle Passage. Europeans established a coastal slave trade in the 15th century and trade to the Americas began in the 16th century, lasting through the 19th century. The vast majority of those who were transported in the transatlantic slave trade were from Central Africa and West Africa and had been sold by West African slave traders to European slave traders, while others had been captured directly by the slave traders in coastal raids. European slave traders gathered and imprisoned the enslaved at forts on the African coast and then brought them to the Americas. Some Portuguese and Europeans participated in slave raids. As the National Museums Liverpool explains: "European traders captured some Africans in raids along the coast, but bought most of them from local African or African-European dealers." Many European slave traders generally did not participate in slave raids because life expectancy for Europeans in sub-Saharan Africa was less than one year during the period of the slave trade because of malaria that was endemic in the African continent. Portuguese coastal raiders found that slave raiding was too costly and often ineffective and opted for established commercial relations.
Spirituals is a genre of Christian music that is associated with African Americans, which merged varied African cultural influences with the experiences of being held in bondage in slavery, at first during the transatlantic slave trade and for centuries afterwards, through the domestic slave trade. Spirituals encompass the "sing songs", work songs, and plantation songs that evolved into the blues and gospel songs in church. In the nineteenth century, the word "spirituals" referred to all these subcategories of folk songs. While they were often rooted in biblical stories, they also described the extreme hardships endured by African Americans who were enslaved from the 17th century until the 1860s, the emancipation altering mainly the nature of slavery for many. Many new derivative music genres such as the blues emerged from the spirituals songcraft.
The slave codes were laws relating to slavery and enslaved people, specifically regarding the Atlantic slave trade and chattel slavery in the Americas.
The Barbados Slave Code of 1661, officially titled as An Act for the better ordering and governing of Negroes, was a law passed by the Parliament of Barbados to provide a legal basis for slavery in the English colony of Barbados. It is the first comprehensive Slave Act, and the code's preamble, which stated that the law's purpose was to "protect them [slaves] as we do men's other goods and Chattels", established that black slaves would be treated as chattel property in the island's court.
Eugene Dominic Genovese was an American historian of the American South and American slavery. He was noted for bringing a Marxist perspective to the study of power, class and relations between planters and slaves in the South. His book Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made won the Bancroft Prize. He later abandoned the left and Marxism and embraced traditionalist conservatism. He wrote during the Cold War and his political beliefs were viewed by some as highly controversial at the time.
The internal slave trade in the United States, also known as the domestic slave trade, the Second Middle Passage and the interregional slave trade, was the mercantile trade of enslaved people within the United States. It was most significant after 1808, when the importation of slaves from Africa was prohibited by federal law. Historians estimate that upwards of one million slaves were forcibly relocated from the Upper South, places like Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Missouri, to the territories and states of the Deep South, especially Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas.
Compensated emancipation was a method of ending slavery, under which the enslaved person's owner received compensation from the government in exchange for manumitting the slave. This could be monetary, and it could allow the owner to retain the slave for a period of labor as an indentured servant. In practice, cash compensation rarely was equal to the slave's market value.
During the era of chattel slavery in the United States, the proper education of enslaved African Americans was highly discouraged, and eventually made illegal in most of the Southern states.
Living in a wide range of circumstances and possessing the intersecting identity of both black and female, enslaved women of African descent had nuanced experiences of slavery. Historian Deborah Gray White explains that "the uniqueness of the African-American female's situation is that she stands at the crossroads of two of the most well-developed ideologies in America, that regarding women and that regarding the Negro." Beginning as early on in enslavement as the voyage on the Middle Passage, enslaved women received different treatment due to their gender. In regard to physical labor and hardship, enslaved women received similar treatment to their male counterparts, but they also frequently experienced sexual abuse at the hand of their enslavers who used stereotypes of black women's hypersexuality as justification.
Slavery in Britain existed before the Roman occupation, which occurred from approximately AD 43 to AD 410, and the practice endured in various forms until the 11th century, during which the Norman conquest of England resulted in the gradual merger of the pre-conquest institution of slavery into serfdom in the midst of other economic upheavals. Given the widespread socio-political changes afterwards, all slaves were no longer recognised separately than other individuals in either English law or formal custom. By the middle of the 12th century, the institution of slavery as it had existed prior to the Norman conquest had fully disappeared, but other forms of unfree servitude continued for some centuries.
Slavery in Virginia began with the capture and enslavement of Native Americans during the early days of the English Colony of Virginia and through the late eighteenth century. They primarily worked in tobacco fields. Africans were first brought to colonial Virginia in 1619, when 20 Africans from present-day Angola arrived in Virginia aboard the ship The White Lion.
Ehud R. Toledano is professor of Middle Eastern history at Tel Aviv University and the current director of the Program in Ottoman & Turkish Studies. His areas of specialization are Ottoman history, and socio-cultural history of the modern Middle East.
Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States is a collection of histories by formerly enslaved people undertaken by the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration from 1936 to 1938. It was the simultaneous effort of state-level branches of FWP in seventeen states, working largely separately from each other. FWP administrators sought to develop a new appreciation for the elements of American life from different backgrounds, including that from the last generation of formerly enslaved individuals. The collections of life histories and materials on African American life that resulted gave impetus to the collection.
Slavery in Cuba was a portion of the larger Atlantic slave trade that primarily supported Spanish plantation owners engaged in the sugarcane trade. It was practiced on the island of Cuba from the 16th century until it was abolished by Spanish royal decree on October 7, 1886.
"What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" was a speech delivered by Frederick Douglass on July 5, 1852, at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, at a meeting organized by the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society. In the address, Douglass states that positive statements about perceived American values, such as liberty, citizenship, and freedom, were an offense to the enslaved population of the United States because they lacked those rights. Douglass referred not only to the captivity of enslaved people, but to the merciless exploitation and the cruelty and torture that slaves were subjected to in the United States.
Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom is a book that tells the history of African American self-education from slavery through the Reconstruction Era. It was written by history professor Heather Andrea Williams and published in 2007 by the University of North Carolina Press.
African-American teachers educated African Americans and taught each other to read during slavery in the South. People who were enslaved ran small schools in secret, since teaching those enslaved to read was a crime. Meanwhile, in the North, African Americans worked alongside Whites. Many privileged African Americans in the North wanted their children taught with White children, and were pro-integration. The Black middle class preferred segregation. During the post-Reconstruction era African Americans built their own schools so they did not have White control. The Black middle class believed that it could provide quality education for their community. This resulted in the foundation of teaching as a profession for Blacks. Some Black families had multiple individuals who dedicated their lives to teaching. They felt that they could empower their communities. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Southern States passed Jim Crow laws to mandate racial segregation in all aspects of society, and prevent Blacks from voting. Racism made it difficult for Black professionals to work in other professions. In 1950, African American teachers made up about half of African-American professionals.
Tera Hunter is an American scholar of African-American history and gender. She holds the Edwards Professor of American History Endowed Chair at Princeton University. She specializes in the study of gender, race, and labor in the history of the Southern United States.
Depicting African-American children as alligator bait was a common trope in American popular culture in the 19th and 20th centuries. The motif was present in a wide array of media, including newspaper reports, songs, sheet music, and visual art. There is an urban legend claiming that black children or infants were in fact used as bait to lure alligators, although there is no meaningful evidence that children of any race were ever used for this purpose. In American slang, alligator bait is a racial slur for African-Americans.
Abolitionist children’s literature includes works written for children by authors committed to the movement to end slavery. It aimed to instill in young readers an understanding of slavery, racial hierarchies, sympathy for the enslaved, and a desire for emancipation. A variety of literary forms were used by abolitionist children’s authors including, short stories, poems, songs, nursery rhymes and dialogues, much of it written by white women. Pamphlets, picture books and periodicals were the primary forms of abolitionist children’s literature, often using Biblical themes to reinforce the wickedness of slavery. Abolitionist children's literature was countered with pro-slavery material aimed at children, which attempting to depict slavery as a noble pursuit, and slaves as stupid and grateful, or evil.
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