Children and Youth during the Civil War Era

James Marten

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780814796085
• eBook ISBN:
  9780814763407
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The Civil War is a much plumbed area of scholarship, so much so that at times it seems there is no further work to be done in the field. However, the experience of children and youth during that tumultuous time remains a relatively unexplored facet of the conflict. Children and Youth during the Civil War Era seeks a deeper investigation into the historical record by and giving voice and context to their struggles and victories during this critical period in American history.

Prominent historians and rising scholars explore issues important to both the Civil War era and to the history of children and youth, including the experience of orphans, drummer boys, and young soldiers on the front lines, and even the impact of the war on the games children played in this collection. Each essay places the history of children and youth in the context of the sectional conflict, while in turn shedding new light on the sectional conflict by viewing it through the lens of children and youth. A much needed, multi-faceted historical account, Children and Youth during the Civil War Era touches on some of the most important historiographical issues with which historians of children and youth and of the Civil War home front have grappled over the last few years.

PART I
Children and the Sectional Conflict

You know that, if you break a small wheel in a cotton-mill, the entire machinery will stop; and if the moon—one of the smallest lumps of matter in the universe—shall fall from its orbit, the whole planetary system might go reeling and tumbling about like a drunken man. So you see the great importance of little things,—and little folks are of much greater importance than little things.

—Edmund Kirke, “The Boy of Chancellorsville”¹

As indicated in this passage from a supposedly true story, told by Edmund Kirke, of a brave drummer boy who survives the Battle of Chancellorsville and a stint in Libby Prison, Civil War–era writers for children stressed that even youngsters had a role to play in the great events of the day. The essays in this part show how children and youth became both exemplars and, at times, actors in the racial and political issues of the sectional conflict that led to war. The war and the decades preceding it were a pivotal moment not only in the nation’s development but also in the ways in which children and youth were integrated into that development.

Slavery was a major battleground between the new and old conceptions of childhood. Indeed, it may have represented the most violent clash between developing notions of innocent children and protected childhood and political and economic reality. One of the greatest ironies of this particular time and place is the fact that, even as affluent white children in the South actually benefited from this new version of childhood, the plight of slave children mocked the idea that childhood should reflect a period of safety and simplicity. Although the rural nature of the South, along with somewhat different attitudes about gender, class, and hierarchy, continued to influence child-rearing practices, many southern families also sought to protect and nurture their children. But new ideas about children and child rearing were layered over older ones; for instance, just as slave children had to learn how to be slave adults, so, too, did white children living in a slave society have to learn how to navigate their status as racial superiors, whether or not they were slave owners. In a larger sense, the practice of enslaving children became a central component of both the abolitionist attack on slavery and the slave owners’ defense of the institution. Rebecca de Schweinitz and Elizabeth Kuebler-Wolf articulate and creatively address the rich ironies in the rise of sentimental childhood even as the decidedly unsentimental rearing of slave children flourished.

The young men in Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai’s essay were the scions of some of those New England families raising the first generation of children nurtured in “modern” child-centered families. Perhaps that gave them the confidence to engage the political issues of the day, to challenge the teach-ers—and, in one case, their college president—and even their parents as the nation whirled toward civil war. Like young southern men of their generation, they challenged the status quo even as they sought ways to take roles in the rising conflict.

The slave children who appear in these essays are less real people than useful symbols of the northern critique and the southern defense of slavery. Yet the issues they represented engaged actual northern college students, who wrote about and acted on the issues raised by the sectional conflict. Perhaps they perceived the disjunction between their own protected childhoods and those of the slave children they had not met. In any event, they saw themselves as political actors perfectly capable of taking part in the great debates of the day. In their own ways, young slaves in the South and privileged young men in the North displayed, to paraphrase Edmund Kirke, the “great importance” of heretofore ignored segments of society.

NOTES

1. Edmund Kirke, “The Boy of Chancellorsville,” Our Young Folks 1 (September 1865): 600.

1
“Waked Up to Feel”
Defining Childhood, Debating Slavery in Antebellum America

REBECCA DE SCHWEINITZ

“A slaveholder never appears to me so completely an agent of hell, as when I think of and look upon my dear children,” Frederick Douglass wrote in his 1845 autobiography. As a free man, Douglass could see to it that his children regularly attended school, slept in comfortable beds, and were trained “in the paths of wisdom and virtue.” But it was precisely the blissful state of his current “domestic affairs” that made apparent the “grim horrors of slavery,” horrors he himself had known as a child. Douglass’s personal history juxtaposed the lives that America’s rising middle class expected for its offspring with the precarious state of slave childhood. While northern middle-class children, including Douglass’s, grew up with “holy lessons and precious endearments” from loving parents, the former slave, like most of the country’s young blacks, grew up “haunted” by the image of an “inexorable demigod,” his slave-master father, who regarded the boy as an economic asset, separated him from his mother as an infant, and “robbed” the terms brother and sister “of their true meaning.” In Douglass’s account, that slavery degraded childhood and made “strangers” out of families was its most damning characteristic.¹

Other abolitionists, black and white, similarly described the “ghastly terrors” of slavery to the nineteenth-century American public through stories of children torn from their “frantic” mothers’ arms, fathers selling their mulatto offspring “as marketable commodities” as if they were “brute beasts.” Their writings imbued parental affections and evolving beliefs about the emotional value of children with political significance and urged white Americans to sympathize with slaves in their roles as parents. Put yourselves in the place of a slave parent, antislavery advocates urged, think of the “tender” slave child “robbed” of “parental care and attention… thrown upon the world without the benefit of its natural guardians… without hope, shelter, comfort, or instruction.”²

Despite the impassioned arguments of Douglass and his fellow abolitionists, few scholars have examined the ways that both abolitionists and slaveholders used ideas about childhood in their efforts to challenge and preserve slavery. While other ideas and issues informed the creation, persistence, and eradication of American slavery, the repeated appearance of ideas about childhood in antebellum slave debates indicate important connections between slavery and the rise of sentimental notions of childhood. The prominence of ideas about childhood in arguments for and against slavery suggests that America’s transition to modern domestic ideals helped to delegitimize the practice of human bondage. At the same time, slave debates themselves reveal America’s transition to modern notions of childhood; indeed, they capture tensions between older, instrumental notions of childhood and newer emotional notions of childhood vying for cultural and political authority in nineteenth-century America.

In the 1780s shifting notions of families and children gave northern lawmakers a compelling reason to “extinguish” the condition of slavery. Decrying the “unnatural” practice of separating husbands and wives “from each other and from their children,” legislators insisted that slavery “deprived [Negro and mulatto slaves] of the common blessings that they were by nature entitled to” and, in so doing, “cast them into the deepest afflictions.” Although early emancipation statutes did not immediately end slavery, they generally provided that children remain with or near parents during infancy, and sometimes early childhood. As Rhode Island lawmakers asserted, “Humanity requires, that Children… remain with their mothers.” It is suggestive of the expanding impact and political significance of sentimental notions of childhood that regardless of other reasons for ending slavery, northern legislatures reported that slavery’s adverse effects on families are what motivated them to pass abolition statutes.³

Scholars have described the rising influence of sentimental domestic ideals among the emergent northern middle class and in the nation’s print culture during the early decades of the nineteenth century. These trends coincided with the growth of the abolitionist movement and with its widespread use of images of children in the battle against slavery. Abolitionists recognized that “nothing can be done to abolish slavery unless we are waked up to feel.” And, like the often fiery Frederick Douglass, many of them turned to sentimental images of children and families to realize that goal. In the antebellum North, with its growing middle class dedicated to sentimental ideals, such tactics seemed especially promising.⁴

Abolitionists repeatedly called on middle-class domestic sensibilities when they challenged their contemporaries to put themselves in the place of slave parents. In his famous exposé,American Slavery as It Is, Theodore Weld insisted that “every man knows that slavery is a curse.” For if a white man were given “an hour to prepare his wife and children for a life of slavery,” to “get ready their necks for the yoke, and their wrists for the coffle chains,” then “nature’s testimony against slavery” would be manifest in “his pale lips and trembling knees.” The Anti-Slavery Examiner similarly encouraged readers to consider slaves’ plight in the context of their own roles and sensibilities as parents by asking: “Am I willing to reduce my little child to slavery?” And, again drawing on the political potential of sentimental childhood, the Non-Slaveholder called “separating parents from their children, and children from their parents,” a “merciless despotism” that “despoiled [families] of their rights, and deprived [them] of hope.”⁵

The popularity of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin confirmed that sentimental images of children and families were especially effective in helping antebellum America feel for the nation’s slaves. Separated from their mothers, given no opportunity for education, suffering in ways that not even adults should have to endure, the slave children in Stowe’s book and other antislavery literature pull on readers’ heartstrings because they are not really children at all. Whether forced to grow up because their families were torn apart, because of hard physical labor, cruel punishments, or the loss of sexual innocence, these were not children according to the ideals of the emerging middle class.

Scholars have noted the ways that abolitionists used ideas about motherhood to capture public sympathy for slaves and encourage white women’s political action.⁶ But nineteenth-century notions of motherhood depended on particular notions of childhood. It was tragic for Stowe’s Henry to be taken from Eliza, or Harriet Jacobs to be separated from her children, not just because Eliza and Harriet were mothers but because antebellum mothers were supposed to protect, nurture, and love their children and shield them from the public world of labor and licentiousness. The Non-Slaveholder explained some of the duties of mothers and the proper conditions of childhood with a poem telling “of the Captive’s child; Whose tiny form is uncaressed, Whose lip in love is rarely pressed.… With none to cherish, no one near / To hush the wail or wipe the tear.” A century earlier, when Americans expected children to contribute directly to the family economy, when there was little distinction between home and work, and when high infant and child mortality rates affected most families, the relationship between mothers and their children did not carry the same social or political significance it did in the nineteenth century. Drawing on earlier notions of childhood, parenthood, and guardianship, nineteenth-century American slaveholders defended themselves by arguing that their slaves benefited from relatively low mortality rates and good health compared with other slave regimes. But as antislavery advocates understood, for antebellum middle-class mothers, raising children involved more than ensuring they survived to adulthood.⁷

Although most slave mothers did not consider murdering their own children, it is striking evidence of changes in notions of childhood and the ways that abolitionists employed childhood for political work that they described death as a preferable alternative to what historian Wilma King calls “stolen childhood.” In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Eliza risks her family members’ lives to save her son from being sold to slave traders, and Cassey poisons her child so he will not grow up in slavery. These mothers’ suicidal and homicidal actions are portrayed as heroic. “O, that child!—how I loved it!” Cassey laments, but continues: “I am not sorry, to this day; he, at least, is out of pain.” Harriet Jacobs suggested to readers in her autobiography that it is “mockery for a slave mother to pray back her dying child to life! Death is better than slavery.” And Louisa J. Hall’s poem “Birth in the Slave Hut” compared the “instinct of joy” that was supposed to accompany childbirth with the experience of a slave mother who wishes to “feel myself childless again / Or dare with my own hand to tear / The life from this creature of pain!” Abolitionists, especially women, repeatedly described death as a welcome “vision” that saves young people from repeated whippings by frenzied masters, reunites mothers with their children, and “unchains” spirits.⁸

Emotional evaluations of childhood shaped both abolitionists’ personal lives and their political tactics. Like many antebellum mothers, Stowe lost a child. Her sixth, Charley, died in the summer of 1849, when barely a year old. With Charley’s death the famous author became like other parents of the era who struggled to reconcile sentimental beliefs about childhood with improving but still formidable child mortality rates. Charley’s early death made him what was commonly known as a “special child.” Stowe captured the thinking behind the concept of the special child when she wrote to a friend: “Is there not something brighter & better around them than around those who live?” Scholars describe the emergence of such characters in nineteenth-century literature as a phenomenon best explained by the elevated status of the middle-class child juxtaposed to the continued threat of infant and child death. The idea that God sent particular children for a short time to their earthly families had “immense reconciling power in an era when many children did in fact die young.”⁹

Reconciled or not, Stowe’s personal tragedy made her well aware of what Joan Hedrick calls “the overwrought feelings of white, middle-class parents” toward their children. Images of sentimentalized childhood throughout antislavery literature indicate that many abolitionists shared Stowe’s awareness and used it to forwar...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I. Children and the Sectional Conflict
• Part II. Children of War
• Part III. Aftermaths
• Part IV. Epilogue
• Documents Through the Eyes of Civil War Children
• Questions for Consideration
• Suggested Readings
• About the Contributors
• Index