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 The book uses historical documents to argue that enslaved children were deprived of experiences now understood to constitute childhood, due to early work responsibilities, frequent bodily and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. Mid-America American Studies Association. 39 (3): 191–193. ISSN0026-3079. JSTOR40642990.
The Underground Railroad was a network of clandestine routes and safe houses established in the United States during the early- to mid-19th century. It was used by enslaved African Americans primarily to escape into free states and Canada. The network was assisted by abolitionists and others sympathetic to the cause of the escapees. The enslaved who risked escape and those who aided them are also collectively referred to as the "Underground Railroad". Various other routes led to Mexico, where slavery had been abolished, and to islands in the Caribbean that were not part of the slave trade. An earlier escape route running south toward Florida, then a Spanish possession, existed from the late 17th century until approximately 1790. However, the network now generally known as the Underground Railroad began in the late 18th century. It ran north and grew steadily until the Emancipation Proclamation was signed by President Abraham Lincoln. One estimate suggests that by 1850, approximately 100,000 enslaved people had escaped to freedom via the network.
Spirituals is a genre of Christian music that is associated with Black Americans, which merged sub-Saharan African cultural heritage 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 emerged from the spirituals songcraft.
Slavery in the colonial history of the United States, from 1526 to 1776, developed from complex factors, and researchers have proposed several theories to explain the development of the institution of slavery and of the slave trade. Slavery strongly correlated with the European colonies' demand for labor, especially for the labor-intensive plantation economies of the sugar colonies in the Caribbean and South America, operated by Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal and the Dutch Republic.
The legal institution of human chattel slavery, comprising the enslavement primarily of Africans and African Americans, was prevalent in the United States of America from its founding in 1776 until 1865, predominantly in the South. Slavery was established throughout European colonization in the Americas. From 1526, during early colonial days, it was practiced in what became Britain's colonies, including the Thirteen Colonies that formed the United States. Under the law, an enslaved person was treated as property that could be bought, sold, or given away. Slavery lasted in about half of U.S. states until abolition. In the decades after the end of Reconstruction, many of slavery's economic and social functions were continued through segregation, sharecropping, and convict leasing.
The Fugitive Slave Act or Fugitive Slave Law was passed by the United States Congress on September 18, 1850, as part of the Compromise of 1850 between Southern interests in slavery and Northern Free-Soilers.
The slave codes were laws relating to slavery and enslaved people, specifically regarding the Atlantic slave trade and chattel slavery in the Americas.
African-American history began with the arrival of Africans to North America in the 16th and 17th centuries. Former Spanish slaves who had been freed by Francis Drake arrived aboard the Golden Hind at New Albion in California in 1579. The European colonization of the Americas, and the resulting transatlantic slave trade, led to a large-scale transportation of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic; of the roughly 10–12 million Africans who were sold by the Barbary slave trade, either to European slavery or to servitude in the Americas, approximately 388,000 landed in North America. After arriving in various European colonies in North America, the enslaved Africans were sold to white colonists, primarily to work on cash crop plantations. A group of enslaved Africans arrived in the English colony of Virginia in 1619, marking the beginning of slavery in the colonial history of the United States; by 1776, roughly 20% of the British North American population was of African descent, both free and enslaved.
Beloved is a 1987 novel by American novelist Toni Morrison. Set in the period after the American Civil War, the novel tells the story of a dysfunctional family of formerly enslaved people whose Cincinnati home is haunted by a malevolent spirit. The narrative of Beloved derives from the life of Margaret Garner, an enslaved person in the slave state of Kentucky who escaped and fled to the free state of Ohio in 1856.
In the British colonies in North America and in the United States before the abolition of slavery in 1865, free Negro or free Black described the legal status of African Americans who were not enslaved. The term was applied both to formerly enslaved people (freedmen) and to those who had been born free.
Slavery in the Spanish American colonies was an economic and social institution which existed throughout the Spanish Empire including Spain itself. In its American territories, Spain displayed an early abolitionist stance towards indigenous people although Native American slavery continued to be practiced, particularly until the New Laws of 1543. The Spanish empire, however was involved in the enslavement of people of African origin. Although the Spanish often depended on others to obtain enslaved Africans and transport them across the Atlantic, the Spanish Empire was a major recipient of enslaved Africans, with around 22% of the Africans delivered to American shores ending up in the Spanish Empire.
The institution of slavery in North America existed from the earliest years of the colonial history of the United States until 1865 when the Thirteenth Amendment permanently abolished slavery throughout the entire United States. It was also abolished among the sovereign Indian tribes in Indian Territory by new peace treaties which the US required after the Civil War.
Slavery has historically been widespread in Africa. Systems of servitude and slavery were common in parts of Africa in ancient times, as they were in much of the rest of the ancient world. When the trans-Saharan slave trade, Indian Ocean slave trade and Atlantic slave trade began, many of the pre-existing local African slave systems began supplying captives for slave markets outside Africa. Slavery in contemporary Africa is still practiced despite it being illegal.
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.
Slavery in Ethiopia existed for centuries, going as far back as 1495 BC. There are also sources indicating the export of slaves from the Aksumite Kingdom. The practice formed an integral part of Ethiopian society, Ethiopians willingly became slaves and sold themselves to many countries like Egypt, Persia and many Arabian countries, including those who did not approve of the institution, such as Emperor Menelik II (1889–1913) and Emperor Haile Selassie, are said to have owned slaves by the thousands.
The treatment of slaves in the United States often included sexual abuse and rape, the denial of education, and punishments like whippings. Families were often split up by the sale of one or more members, usually never to see or hear of each other again.
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.
Wilma King is a historian and the Arvarh E. Strickland Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Missouri. She holds a B.A. in American history from Jackson State University, and both an M.A. and Ph.D. in Recent U.S. History from Indiana University. She came to the University of Missouri in 1999 and was the first to receive appointment to the Arvarh E. Strickland chair in Black History and Culture, established when Strickland retired.
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 practised on the island of Cuba from the 16th century until it was abolished by Spanish royal decree on October 7, 1886.
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.
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