Enslaved Children Research Articles

Experiences of Enslaved Children in Luanda, 1850–1869

About half of Luanda’s population comprised enslaved people in the mid-nineteenth century. Although scholars have examined the expansion of slavery in Angola after the end of the transatlantic slave trade and the use of slavery to underpin the trade in tropical commodities, the labor performed by enslaved children has been neglected. This study explores the experiences of enslaved children working in Luanda during the era of the so-called “legitimate” commerce in tropical commodities, particularly between 1850 and 1869. It draws upon slave registers, official reports, and the local gazette, the Boletim Oficial de Angola, to analyze the means through which children were enslaved, the tasks they performed, their background, family connections, and daily experiences under enslavement. This paper argues that masters expected enslaved children to perform the same work attributed to enslaved men and women. After all, they saw captives as a productive unit irrespective of their age.

The function of power: A herstorical model of power, trauma, and policing African Americans.

Transmitting trauma narratives is intergenerational by nature. Few studies have taken a qualitative approach to analyzing the most pervasive trauma of the United States: the chattel slavery of Black people. Examining the lived experiences of the formerly enslaved, through their childhood and adult narrative memories of personal and second-hand interactions with White authority figures, is critical to the recognition of today's ongoing impact of policing, generational trauma, and mental health in the African American community. Using interviews archived in the Library of Congress from women (N = 19) who were identified as being members of the last living generation of formerly enslaved African Americans, researchers used a feminist-forward grounded theory methodology to understand the following: (a) What are the historical relationships between African Americans and White authority figures? (b) What are the memories associated with the interactions between African Americans and White authority figures? (c) How did these interaction processes come to be? and (d) How did these memories get passed on? The analysis of childhood memories and interactions between enslavers and African Americans close to home (i.e., on the plantation) produced six themes: (a) enmeshment with enslaver, (b) enslaver as good, (c) caretaking by enslaver, (d) enslaver control, (e) violent control by policing figures, and (f) following orders. Theoretical coding led to the formation of a full model of the function of power within the herstorical policing of African Americans close to home. The themes uncovered highlight the potentially traumatic violence and control that characterized the environment in which enslaved children lived and the systems through which White power was maintained. The herstorical analysis and results confirm the ways police violence has sought to control and harm African Americans for over 400 years and underscores the role that police violence has played in the perpetuation of intergenerational trauma and the maintenance of White power. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The Case of the Slave-Child, Med: Free Soil in Antislavery Boston by Karen Woods Weierman

Reviewed by: The Case of the Slave-Child, Med: Free Soil in Antislavery Boston by Karen Woods Weierman Sarah E. Yerima The Case of the Slave-Child, Med: Free Soil in Antislavery Boston. By Karen Woods Weierman. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2019. xv + 164 pp. In 1836, a six-year-old enslaved girl named Med accompanied her enslaver from New Orleans to Boston. As an enslaved child in a free state, Med possessed an obscure legal status: should she be accorded the rights of legal personhood, or did she retain the status of animate property? The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decided Med's fate in Commonwealth v. Aves (1836), when it ruled that enslaved people transported into Massachusetts were entitled to freedom. While many scholars have discussed the free-soil legal precedent set by Commonwealth v. Aves, few have considered Med's life before and after the case. Now, throughout this book, Karen Woods Weierman carefully examines Commonwealth v. Aves by placing Med, the child litigant, at the center of the suit's history. After the ruling, the newly freed Med was released into state custody. Separated from her family, she spent two years in a Massachusetts orphanage for poor, Black children before dying from an unnamed illness. How could Med have met such a tragic fate? Weierman contends that scholars must be attentive to the minor, dependent status of children who served as plaintiffs in freedom suits. In so doing, we gain a better understanding of the complicated, incomplete forms of emancipation that freedom suits often generated. For a formerly enslaved child, freedom "really meant being under the control of different adults" (41). By connecting the histories of slavery, childhood, and the law, Weierman makes a vital scholarly contribution and a compelling argument about the precarious nature of freedom in the antebellum North. The book is organized into five thematic chapters. In the first chapter, Weierman discusses the free-soil principle as it emerged in eighteenth-century [End Page 332] England with Somerset v. Stewart (1772) and compares Med's life to that of Phillis Wheatley. Both Med and Wheatley were brought to Boston as enslaved children. Both were embraced in abolitionist circles, emancipated and, eventually, abandoned by white benefactors. Wheatley, however, lived into adulthood and left behind a body of creative work. Weierman asks how we might "be responsibly creative" in using Wheatley's extant writings "to imagine Med's interiority" (28). In the second chapter, Weierman details the proceedings of Med's trial. Med's enslaver, Samuel Slater, argued that he maintained guardianship over Med in Massachusetts because he possessed ownership of Med's mother. Slater also argued that Med's manumission was wrongful since it would separate Med from the rest of her family. Med's lawyers countered that Slater could reunify the family by manumitting all of Med's relatives. Throughout this chapter, Weierman notes how each side professed its right to speak for Med while failing to ask Med what she held most important. Thus, Med's minor status made her own wishes and desires insignificant to enslavers and antislavery activists alike. The third chapter considers the contested meaning of Med's freedom. How free is an emancipated child who has been separated from her family and placed under the care and supervision of strangers? Weierman examines Med's fate after the ruling and explores the outcomes of other freedom suits with child litigants. Weierman argues that antislavery activists failed "to see beyond the freedom suit scenario, to understand what the outcomes meant for actual children, and to revise the script in response to complicated situations" (63). In the fourth and fifth chapters, Weierman follows Med's erasure from antislavery narratives in the wake of her death. Weierman first turns to commemorative efforts, noting how many memorials of Commonwealth v. Aves sought not to honor Med but to laud the ostensibly superior moral character of the free North and its white residents. Weierman then considers how the legal principles of Med's case shaped nineteenth-century realist novels about slavery and freedom. Characters partially inspired by Med were often portrayed as adults, as was the case in Maria Weston Chapman's...

Demographics of war: mortality in Porto Alegre during Guerra dos Farrapos, 1835-1845

This article presents an analysis of the impacts of the Guerra dos Farrapos (1835-1845) on the mortality of the population of Porto Alegre, drawing primarily on baptism and death records, comparing the periods before and after the conflict, ranging from 1825 to 1854. Anomalies can be noted in the first five years of the war, when the city was under siege from the rebels. The results, based on a calculation of infant mortality and other indicators, show not only that there were supply difficulties and deteriorated sanitary conditions, but also that mortality levels surged in response to a scarlet fever epidemic, which hit free and enslaved children particularly hard.

Childhood in Captivity: Bioarchaeological Evidence from a Late Colonial Sugar Plantation in Central Peru

Children and childhood have emerged as important topics for understanding the history of African slavery in the Americas. In historical archaeology, analyses of subadult skeletal remains have provided valuable information about the biological and social conditions of captivity, yet children are infrequently the primary subjects of study in African diaspora bioarchaeology. Recent bioarchaeological research at Hacienda La Quebrada, a late colonial sugar plantation in central Peru, brings new data to bear on these subjects. Excavations at the cemetery for the plantation's enslaved African and Afro-descendant population recovered 158 subadults ranging from newborns to 20 years old, who represented 64% of the burial sample. Paleodemographic data and skeletal indicators of stress indicate that enslaved children were disproportionately affected by the conditions of life at Hacienda La Quebrada, particularly because of insufficient diets and susceptibility to infection and disease. Although these results are specific to the context of plantation slavery in Peru's coastal sugar economy, they contribute new information about the history of African slavery in Peru and about the study of childhood in conditions of captivity and colonialism in the Spanish Americas more broadly.

“They Gave the Children China Dolls”: Toys, Socialization, and Gendered Labor on American Plantations

ABSTRACT Play has long been understood to be a key aspect of childhood socialization into gender roles, including gendered labor. Yet, some have reasonably assumed that enslaved children on plantations in the United States had little time for play and that any toys owned by them would have been homemade and thus difficult to later identify archaeologically. Evidence from slavery-related sites in the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS), however, demonstrates that formal toys in the form of porcelain dolls, toy dishes, marbles, and military toys were not uncommon possessions for enslaved children in the American South. The recovery of formal toys in living quarters used by enslaved people is especially surprising given that their intended socialization messages did not align with the future gendered labor roles of enslaved children. These toys thus reveal the complicated socializing forces and messages about gendered labor that enslaved children encountered through play.

Are Enslaved Children Called to Come to Jesus? Freeborn and Enslaved Children in John Chrysostom’s On Vainglory

Abstract John Chrysostom, circa 349–407 ce, wrote “On Vainglory, or The Right Way to Raise Children,” which purports to be about raising all Christian children. In fact, out of ninety chapters, only one deals with girls. Even more significant are the numerous overlooked children in the text, who are present but whose Christian education is never discussed because they are enslaved. This paper utilizes childist criticism to draw these enslaved children from hiddenness into plain sight. The paper is situated in the context of Jesus’ teaching about children because Chrysostom believes that the best way to raise children is by teaching them stories from the Bible, Hebrew Bible first, then New Testament, but instead of an openness to all children he discusses only freeborn, elite boys. Chrysostom’s treatise exposes the context of how few children in late antiquity could be shaped by biblical interpretation intended for all children. (147 words)

Poetry Wars: Verse and Politics in the American Revolution and Early Republic

Poetry Wars: Verse and Politics in the American Revolution and Early Republic

Child Slavery before and after Emancipation: An Argument for Child-Centered Slavery Studies ed. by Anna Mae Duane

Reviewed by: Child Slavery before and after Emancipation: An Argument for Child-Centered Slavery Studies ed. by Anna Mae Duane Shannon C. Eaves Child Slavery before and after Emancipation: An Argument for Child-Centered Slavery Studies. Edited by Anna Mae Duane. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. xvi, 307. Paper, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-107-56670-5; cloth, $89.99, ISBN 978-1-107-12756-2.) Black sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, held signs that read, "I AM A MAN," as they protested in 1968 for better working conditions and respect, generating one of the most iconic images of the civil rights movement. Referring to black men and women as boy and gal—a vestige of antebellum slavery—was intended to mark them as infantile and thus as a counterpoint to the autonomous citizen. With signs, the protesters touted their manhood to reject these monikers that had shackled African Americans for centuries. They drew public attention to how the figurative child had been corrupted to justify slavery and subjugation. Childhood Slavery before and after Emancipation: An Argument for Child-Centered Slavery Studies asks why scholars and activists too often lose sight of the child in slavery studies, when this figure has historically "provided both the conceptual underpinning for justifying slavery and much of the labor within slavery's machinations" (p. 4). The volume calls for a shift in methodology, asserting that a renewed focus on childhood within slavery studies would reshape how slavery is taught and written about, as well as the assumptions with which scholars confront twenty-first-century exploitation. Editor Anna Mae Duane contends that it is only through answering the question, "When is a child a slave?," that scholars and activists can identify "when anyone in the modern world is a slave" (p. 2). Duane describes Childhood Slavery before and after Emancipation as a "transhistorical endeavor" that brings scholars of slavery in the United States into conversation with scholars of modern-day slavery and human trafficking (p. 2). The collection's key interventions are to inspire child-centered historical studies and "to trace how undertheorized assumptions about childhood dependence and adult power have allowed structures of enslavement to persist" (p. 4). The volume is organized into four parts, and its contributors present a wide range of topics, including the paradox of childhood innocence and enslavement, white slavery in the American imagination, the school-to-prison pipeline, and modern-day child soldiering. While the chapters tackle exploitation across time and space and use an array of sources from court cases to oral histories, they are all "organized around attributes that entangle definitions of children with definitions of slaves" (p. 15). Though each chapter is thought provoking, several are worth highlighting. In "The Slave Child as 'Gift': Involutions of Proprietary and Familial Relations in the Slaveholding Household before Emancipation," Sarah Winter examines slave narratives and a noteworthy British court case to grapple with the legal and ideological inconsistencies that emerged when one child came to own another. The historical conflation of childhood and innocence rendered children—black and white—dependent and incapable of giving consent or rightfully owning property, what Winter calls the "legal disability of childhood" (p. 54). She argues that the premise of a dependent child, incapable of consent, receiving an enslaved child as a gift was cloaked in illegitimacy; yet families engaged in gift-giving "as a ritual for inducting the children of slaveholders into the privileges and powers of mastery" (p. 54). [End Page 444] At the turn of the twentieth century, the American public became enthralled with "white slavery," the coercion of young white girls into prostitution. In "The White Slave: American Girlhood, Race, and Memory at the Turn of the Century," Micki McElya argues that Progressive-era reformers drew on popular memories of antebellum slavery to equate commercial sex in urban centers with slavery and to claim all white sex workers, regardless of age, as enslaved children who needed the public's protection, a consideration that was never extended to enslaved black children. According to McElya, the popular memory of slavery not only propelled American modernity in the form of sweeping reform and the emerging genre of white slavery novels and...

Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America by Patricia Crain

Reviewed by: Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America by Patricia Crain MicKenzie Fasteland (bio) Patricia Crain. Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America. U of Pennsylvania P, 2016. Patricia Crain's Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America constructs an impressive history exploring the ideological underpinnings of literacy development in the United States, a practice she argues promised children both the opportunity for property acquisition (of themselves, of books) and escape (from themselves [End Page 152] into a book). If children were the property of their parents—or in the case of enslaved children, their owners—literacy provided one method for gaining the cultural and financial capital required for independence. Simultaneously, early children's literature promoted the affective bonds between adults and children, thereby ensuring what Courtney Weikle-Mills calls the "transfer of children's affectionate feelings, through education, from their parents to the law" (43) Although literacy nominally promised self-possession, its promise was highly conditional upon the child's race. Laws banned enslaved children from learning to read and write, whereas Christian missionaries used the promise of ownership to perpetuate the cultural genocide of Native populations by "acculturating them to white property customs" (7). After the Civil War, images of the "reading child" illustrated an alternative privilege offered to middle-class white children: the option to escape oneself. If reading became a site of pleasure for middle-class children, the sight of children reading and writing provided adults nostalgic access to their own childhood selves, leading to what Crain calls the "medial child" in the late nineteenth century, a figure that she argues "often functions as a residual and conserving and at the same time emergent and creative means of accessing the 'interiorised self' (in Carolyn Steedman's term) of modernity" (8–9). Crain creates a vast network of archival and literary sites stretching from the seventeenth to twenty-first centuries, and her inclusive approach situates her scholarship at the intersection of book history, literary analysis, and histories of childhood. She begins with two chapters examining the divergent trajectories of two canonical children's texts, Goody Two Shoes and "The Children in the Woods." The former provides one of the earliest links between literacy and cultural capital, as Goody's nigh-magical ability to read and write, and in turn, instruct others using her wooden alphabet, provides her (and by extension, disenfranchised populations) a radical new route to prosperity, one outside lines of inheritance that cannot be lost; however, later adaptations would lose this revolutionary spirit, transforming Goody's "economic bildung" into a fairy tale suited more for promoting reading absorption instead of agency (29). In contrast, Crain traces the near 400-year history of "The Children in the Woods" from adult ballad to cherished children's tale to excavate the imagined child reader so central to the development of children's literature. Despite its dark subject—a dispute resulting in the death of two children—the ballad became popular because the genre's orality allowed eighteenth-century collectors and children's publishers to imagine a child audience listening to and learning from their literary peers' experience. While as much a product of nostalgia as a burgeoning literary market, this hypothetical child reader demonstrates that "what makes children's literature possible is adult consciousness of childhood as a privileged time and space [End Page 153] that's been lost . . . and yet remains indefinitely accessible to adult memory and imagination through the medium of literature and the practices of literacy" (53). And yet, if Goody promised equality (at least in its early iteration), later adaptations of "The Children in the Woods" began to carve out childhood as a haven only for white children. Here, Crain begins to develop one of her most crucial interventions, which she continues throughout her third and fourth chapters: how literacy instruction, practice, and ideology upheld colonialism and white supremacy in the United States. Her third chapter explains how missionaries indoctrinated Cherokee children in white property practices by teaching literacy through the Lancaster pedagogical system. In contrast to the slow reveries of white, middle-class reading...

The impact of social experiences of physical and structural violence on the growth of African enslaved children recovered from Lagos, Portugal (15th-17th centuries).

The purpose of this article is to examine the impacts of physical and structural violence on the well-being of early modern enslaved Africans by comparing the growth of children in an archaeological sample recovered from Lagos, Portugal with that of modern children known to have lived under socially oppressive and racist political regimes. The age of 18 individuals was estimated from the length of developing teeth. Long bone lengths for age in the enslaved African sample were compared with two black juvenile known age samples: the Raymond Dart (South Africa) and Hamann-Todd (United States) collections. Z-scores were calculated for all samples using black children in the South Africa Long Bone (SALB) database as the reference. The similarity of growth across the samples was tested and skeletal growth profiles (SGPs) were devised for the three samples. The children in the Lagos, Raymond Dart, and Hamann-Todd samples were all small for age compared to the SALB reference. While children in the Dart sample tended to be the smallest for age and in the Hamann-Todd the largest, with the children in the Lagos sample falling between them, the three samples did not show significant differences in growth status. The growth deficits shown in this study demonstrate the severe impacts of physical and structural violence on the lives of these children. Although uncertainty remains regarding the timing of growth insults relative to arrival, slavery in Portugal as materialized in these individuals was as violent as in other countries.

‘Thrown upon the world’: valuing infants in the eighteenth-century North American slave market

ABSTRACTThroughout the eighteenth century, advertisements offering enslaved infants and children for free appeared in New England newspapers; historians have not previously discussed this apparently anomalous northern practice of giving away children. Scholars of slavery are increasingly accentuating the implications of human property embodying profit, but this article uses these advertisements to consider what it meant to embody financial loss, and how the ‘giving away’ of enslaved children complicates the current historical framing of American slavery as a capitalist enterprise. That not all enslaved people embodied a positive value only accentuates the calculations at the heart of American chattel slavery.

Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development ed. by Sven Beckert, Seth Rockman, and: The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815–1860 by Calvin Schermerhorn

Reviewed by: Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development ed. by Sven Beckert, Seth Rockman, and: The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815–1860 by Calvin Schermerhorn Christopher Clark (bio) KEY WORDS Slavery, Capitalism, Slave trade, Economy, Banking, Finance, Business Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development. Edited by Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. viii + 406. Cloth, $39.95.) The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815–1860. By Calvin Schermerhorn. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015. Pp. vi + 336. Cloth, $65.00) The two books under review advance the paradigm shift in interpretations of antebellum American slavery that has been under way for two [End Page 736] decades. Mark Smith, Richard Follett, Walter Johnson, Sven Beckert, Edward Baptist, and others have challenged previous assumptions that southern society was pre-modern, that the southern economy was “backward,” and that capitalism and slavery—understood as systems in a Marxian sense—were antithetical to one another. Works such as Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York, 2014) have put American developments in a global perspective, helping scholars see beyond national boundaries to interpret American slavery within wider patterns of power, trade, and labor exploitation. As Beckert and Seth Rockman note in their lucid introduction to Slavery’s Capitalism, the rapid expansion and intensification of American slavery after 1790 formed part of a wider “second slavery” that embraced plantation regions in the Caribbean and Brazil. The suppression of the international slave trade to the United States in 1808 was more than balanced by the expansion of an internal slave trade that forcibly moved one million or more people by land or coastal sea passage over the subsequent half-century. Not only were capitalism and slavery intertwined, but North and South were deeply interdependent: People and regions of the North were economically and morally complicit in the slave system. Far from being “backward,” southern economies exhibited many of the characteristics of an emergent American capitalism. The nation’s wealthiest places were in the plantation South, and the next wealthiest were northern centers involved in trading or processing slave-grown products. Moreover, as these two books amply illustrate, the slave trade, slave-based production, and the many facets of the “business of slavery” employed financial instruments, organizational methods, and technologies usually taken as hallmarks of capitalist enterprise. Calvin Schermerhorn traces these methods by examining the firms that conducted the internal slave trade, noting the development of new patterns over time. The Baltimore slave trader Austin Woolfolk built a “brand” in the business during the 1810s and 1820s, advertising “Cash for Negroes” in upper South newspapers. His name became sufficiently well known that Frederick Douglass would recall parents using it as a bogey-man to scare enslaved children. Woolfolk built his business running slaves to the expanding plantation South by organizing coffles to be marched overland or chartering space in coastal sailing vessels trading between the Chesapeake and southern ports. By the 1830s, the most prominent slave-trading firm, Franklin and Armfield, had built a vertically integrated operation, purchasing slaves at various points in the [End Page 737] border states and upper South, shipping them to New Orleans in purpose-built vessels purchased from New England shipyards, and offering them for sale in New Orleans or the Natchez region at auction houses that were under the firm’s direct control. By the 1850s, the capitalist Charles Morgan was using a different business model, employing steamships that also carried cargoes and regular passengers to move slaves to points on the Texas Gulf coast for sale into the far reaches of the Southwest’s cotton frontier. As Schermerhorn demonstrates, these differing arrangements at the level of the firm always depended on the extension of credit, for which new techniques and new banking institutions were also developed. After the Panic of 1837, international bankers became important figures in the trade in slaves. Quintessentially capitalist institutions developed at the heart of the slave economy. But if business methods and paper financial instruments structured the slave trade and oiled its mechanisms, Schermerhorn never loses sight of the...

Fertility control, shared nurturing, and dual exploitation: the lives of enslaved mothers in the antebellum United States

ABSTRACTSlaveholders believed women could both labour and care for their children simultaneously, and they routinely exploited enslaved mothers as both workers and as reproducers. Using Stephanie Camp’s conceptualization of enslaved women’s bodies as sites of resistance, this article argues that despite slavery’s arduousness motherhood provided a place of refuge for enslaved women to enjoy their children and the camaraderie of their peers. However, women sometimes lamented bringing enslaved children into the world and strove not to do so, especially when pregnancy resulted from sexual assault. Slavery’s unique burdens meant many women participated in shared and more communal forms of mothering than their white counterparts.

The Recruitment, Training and Conflicts surrounding “Native teachers” in the Moravian Mission in the Danish West Indies in the Nineteenth Century

This article studies the role of indigenous teachers within the school system run by the Moravian mission in the Danish West Indies. The mission opened its first day schools for enslaved children in 1841 a few years before the abolition of slavery. The missionaries were reliant on the support of teachers of Afro-Caribbean origin, which were trained in one of the teacher training institutes run by the Mico-Charity Society. This article proposes that the recruitment of Afro-Caribbean teachers with different denominational backgrounds and professional education challenged the mission hierarchy. This will be pointed out by focusing on the recruitment and training of the teachers and by an analysis of their position within the mission society.

Historicizing Gender, Medicine, and Biopolitics

Historicizing Gender, Medicine, and Biopolitics Okezi T. Otovo (bio) Juanita De Barros. Reproducing the British Caribbean: Sex, Gender, and Population Politics after Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. xi + 279 pp. ISBN 978-1-4696-1605-6 (pb). A. Kim Clark. Gender, State, and Medicine in Highland Ecuador: Modernizing Women, Modernizing the State, 1895–1950. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012. vii + 255 pp. ISBN 978-0-8229-6209-0 (pb). Liat Kozma. Policing Egyptian Women: Sex, Law, and Medicine in Khedival Egypt. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011. ix + 174 pp; ill. ISBN 978-0-8156-3281-8 (cl). As historians of many areas of the world continue to confirm, the seemingly private dynamics of family life have long been absolutely essential to the directives of imperial regimes and consolidating nation states. All three of the compelling texts examined for this review further reinforce the inextricability of reproduction, sexuality, and gender politics to “modernizing” states. De Barros and Kozma tackle colonial adventures in population management and state consolidation in the nineteenth-century British Caribbean and Khedival Egypt, respectively. Clark, however, analyzes Ecuadorian nation building and the liberal-inspired politics that expanded women and children’s services and policies during the early to mid-twentieth century. Across the three, and in diverse geographical and political contexts, the authors remind their readers that healthy reproduction, family stability, and “proper” sexuality—in all their gendered complexity—have never been far removed from the administration of the state. The authors show myriad ways that political leaders and state agencies, when facing critical historical junctures, turn to monitoring and managing families. They uncover the contexts that bring state attention to, and often policing of, women’s reproductive and childrearing choices, gendered familial roles, and sexual activities within and beyond the confines of the home. And, most importantly, these scholars bring into focus the complex negotiations, constraints, and opportunities engendered when states designate their populations as a key site for making politics. Of the three books, De Barros’s Reproducing the British Caribbean best develops the transnational context in which reproduction and infant [End Page 149] mortality emerged as central to postcolonial politics and economic policy in three colonies. According to De Barros, one significant strain of early nineteenth-century British abolitionism held that the inability of enslaved populations to reproduce themselves laid bare the gross inhumanity and inefficiency of slavery. This “demographic abolitionism” labeled slave societies like Jamaica, Barbados, and Guyana as places marked by a failure of women of reproductive age to birth healthy infants and by high mortality rates among enslaved children. De Barros investigates all three geographic contexts, as well as Trinidad and Tobago to a lesser extent, although the regional approach of the body of her study often loses the nuanced differentiation between these sites promised in the introduction. Seen through the lens of “demographic abolitionism,” the great promise of emancipation would be an immediate and measurable increase in population size and a rapid decline in infant mortality. When slavery was abolished across the British empire in 1834 and there was no population boom in the Caribbean, colonial officials accused the formerly enslaved of being careless with their children, unwilling to attend to family health and hygiene, and reluctant to pay for medical care. Even the cholera epidemics of 1849 and 1854 and the depressed sugar prices of the 1870s and 1880s did little to silence the critics who proclaimed that black populations failed to take advantage of the “gift” of emancipation. Most of De Barros’s text traces local attempts to respond to the “failed experiment” of emancipation through public health and social programs aimed at women and children (9). The responses also included immigration schemes that brought Chinese and South Asian laborers to the British Caribbean and circulated adults seeking work between islands, Panama, and the United States. In the British Caribbean of the nineteenth century, De Barros argues that colonial administration in the post-abolition period was mainly understood as a riddle of demographic manipulation and population engineering. The regional approach of this study successfully elucidates the post-abolition global economic forces and labor anxieties that reverberated throughout the British Empire and on the poorest...

Up from Childhood: When African-American Enslaved Children Learned of Their Servile Status

There came a moment in enslaved children's lives when they perceived that they were ‘different’ from their white playmates: they became cognisant of being slaves. This moment was part of a three-part process, which must be studied collectively in order to understand its full impact on child-slave identity formation. The first stage comprised a period of ‘blissful ignorance’ and many children spent several years unaware that they were chattel. The second stage of development forced children to confront their servile status. This realisation could be an instantaneous recognition; however, the full repercussions took children much longer to understand. In the final stage, enslaved children questioned their identity; they had to ‘learn’ that they were racially different from others, and that by virtue of being different, they were inferior. This study further tests David Bailey's findings that the slave autobiographies portrayed a more ‘traumatic’ childhood experience than did the Works Progress Administration (WPA) interviews [David Bailey, ‘A Divided Prism: Two Sources of Black Testimony on Slavery’, Journal of Southern History 46, no. 3 (1980): 381–404]. But the sources do not necessarily tell two conflicting stories; rather the data collected by the WPA concur with the autobiographies. The age at which former slaves realised that they were enslaved greatly shaped their memories. Applying the three-stage theory to Bailey's findings suggests that many of the WPA interviewees were too young to have experienced stage two before Emancipation. Thus, their renditions of slavery correspond to the step one blissful memories from the autobiographers, suggesting that the two sources are perhaps not so antithetic when employed together.

A Time (Not) Apart: A Lesson in Economic History from Cotton Picking Books

I use the individual-level records from my own family in rural Mississippi to estimate the agricultural productivity of African Americans in manual cotton picking nearly a century after Emancipation, 1952–1965. On average, the Logan children were more than 95 % as productive as enslaved children from the same region in the late antebellum era, 1850–1860. Gender differences in productivity were smaller than among enslaved children and disappeared by late pubescence. Additional qualitative evidence answers questions about agricultural productivity that cannot be derived from the quantitative data. For example, the method of cotton picking was not the gang-labor system described by some economic historians, but an independent process. The qualitative evidence also shows that economic roles were deeply intertwined with racial identity.

Mothering the "Useless": Black Motherhood, Disability, and Slavery

Abstract For decades, scholars have studied virtually every aspect of day-to-day enslaved life in antebellum America, giving particular attention to the nuances and intricacies of slave family and community life. Yet few have considered the social relations of disabilities in these most intimate and closely guarded spaces or questioned, in particular, the challenges that women faced navigating the complex experience of enslaved motherhood when their children lived with disabilities. Since the United States’s economically driven regime of chattel slavery reduced human beings to property valued according to their ability to labor, slaveholders categorized those with disabilities as "useless" and sometimes even "chargeable" (negatively valued because the cost of their care was a financial liability). This pragmatic, calculated reasoning left disabled, enslaved children particularly vulnerable because slaveholders devalued them as property and potential future laborers, privileging mothers’ labor over their disabled children’s presumably irrelevant needs. But these beliefs also sometimes worked to enslaved mothers’ advantage since disabled children were less likely to be bought or sold away. Even then, however, women still confronted a myriad of challenges in meeting their children’s daily needs and facing other unusual, often emotionally charged situations. For instance, owners sometimes sent their children elsewhere for surgeries to "correct" their disabilities, while others simply refused to invest in their medical needs. Disability also intersected with enslaved motherhood when women experienced disabilities, which sometimes helped them avoid separation from their children, though often as a result of extremely disturbing circumstances. Finally, because mothers were forced to rely on others for childcare while they worked, bondspeople with disabilities oftentimes took on this important task and social role. The presence of disabilities among enslaved people, then, shaped many aspects of mothers’ and children’s relationships to one another in ways that were both positive and negative. Grappling with the complex realities of enslaved motherhood through the lens of disability reveals that women rejected slaveholders’ definitions of their children; they adapted, resisted, and persevered to ensure that they mothered their "useless" children to the best of their ability, despite living under an institution that inherently devalued them.

Child Slaves in the Modern World by Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, Joseph C. Miller (review)

Reviewed by: Child Slaves in the Modern World by Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, Joseph C. Miller Colleen A. Vasconcellos Child Slaves in the Modern World. By Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, eds. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011. v + 281 pp. $24.95. Having already reviewed the first book in this two-volume set (JHCY volume 3, number 3), it was a pleasure to be given the same opportunity with this book. As with its companion, the editors of Child Slaves in the Modern World note that this is not a comprehensive anthology of child slavery in the modern world. Hopefully this assertion forces the reader to pause and think about the weight of that statement. Chapters on India’s child brides or the numerous children who labored in Stalin’s gulags are not included. Yet, this second volume does build upon the complex and fluid perimeters of childhood and slavery set by the first in order to show a blurry, somewhat subjective definition of childhood that is just as difficult to delineate in the modern world. This speaks as much to the ever-changing nature of childhood as to the environments and cultures in which these children lived and labored. While this second volume continues to force readers to rethink their definition and perception of slavery and childhood, Child Slaves in the Modern World also shows them how these boundaries continued to change once enlightened citizens began to push for the abolition of the slave trade and slavery in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Divided into two sections, this book takes more of a chronological approach than the first. While the first section examines child slavery during the era of abolition, the final five chapters comprise a second section examining enslaved children in the modern era. Although the difference in size between the two sections makes the volume seem a bit imbalanced, each section has its strengths. Furthermore, that imbalance becomes more understandable as the reader delves deeper into the volume. The majority of the chapters contained in the first section focus on children enslaved in Africa from 1790 to 1914, adding more imbalance to the volume despite the editors’ promise of a wide geographical range. However, Sue Taylor’s examination of the complex negotiations between parents and the Caracas Courts over enslaved children and Nara Milanich’s discussion of tutelary servitude in Latin America challenge more traditional ideas of slavery in the Americas to show that children, and not always children [End Page 396] of African descent, were enslaved and used as labor outside of the conventional plantation setting. That said, Cicely Jones’s outstanding piece on plantation children in the British Caribbean challenges that traditional viewpoint further by showcasing child resistance and agency. In perhaps the most interesting chapter of the section, Benjamin Lawrence presents a fascinating discussion of the experiences of the four children captive aboard La Amistad, children who seem to have had more of an active role than Hollywood’s Cinque. The remaining five chapters of this section focus on children’s experiences in the slave trade and colonial Africa. Yet, despite this heavy focus on Africa, readers begin to understand this imbalance as they progress through the final chapters of this first section. Just as the editors challenge customary views of childhood and slavery, they also expand the more commonly used periodization of the Age of Abolition—a strategic move that forces readers to look into the twentieth century. As they point out in their introduction, many chapters included in this section discuss the experiences of enslaved children living in a time when abolitionists witnessed the increased emancipation of slaves throughout the Western world. However, slavery continued in Africa and still continues there today. Therefore, while William Clarence-Smith shows how lax Catholic policies were in ending slavery in central Africa, Trevor Getz discusses the ineptitude and cultural naiveté of the colonial administrators handling enslaved children in the early colonial Gold Coast. After reading about the state enslavement of children in post-emancipation Senegal, as discussed by Bernard Moitt, one is not surprised that the practice persisted. Hopefully these chapters push the reader to question those enlightened abolitionists of...