Children in Colonial America

James Marten, Philip J Greven, James Marten

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN:
  9780814757161
• eBook ISBN:
  9780814795804
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

The Pilgrims and Puritans did not arrive on the shores of New England alone. Nor did African men and women, brought to the Americas as slaves. Though it would be hard to tell from the historical record, European colonists and African slaves had children, as did the indigenous families whom they encountered, and those children's life experiences enrich and complicate our understanding of colonial America.
Through essays, primary documents, and contemporary illustrations, Children in Colonial America examines the unique aspects of childhood in the American colonies between the late sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries. The twelve original essays observe a diverse cross-section of children—from indigenous peoples of the east coast and Mexico to Dutch-born children of the Plymouth colony and African-born offspring of slaves in the Caribbean—and explore themes including parenting and childrearing practices, children's health and education, sibling relations, child abuse, mental health, gender, play, and rites of passage.
Taken together, the essays and documents in Children in Colonial America shed light on the ways in which the process of colonization shaped childhood, and in turn how the experience of children affected life in colonial America.

Part I

Race and Colonization

Broteer, son of Saungm Furro, had it all when he was born in Guinea, on the west coast of Africa, around 1729. His father was prince of the Dukandarra; despite family tensions caused by jealousies among the prince’s several wives, Broteer could look forward to a life of affluence and power. However, his world collapsed before he had the chance to enjoy it. Another band from a distant region, encouraged and armed by European slave traders, invaded Broteer’s territory, capturing smaller, less powerful groups and herding them toward the Atlantic coast. His father’s attempts to negotiate failed, and when he refused to reveal the location of his people’s treasury, he was tortured to death before Broteer’s eyes. The rest were marched to the coast, put on a slave ship, and conveyed to America. On the way nearly a fourth died when smallpox broke out on the tiny vessel. Although most of the human cargo was sold in Barbados, Broteer and a few others sailed to Rhode Island. His new American owner, proud to be finally making an investment in the lucrative slave trade, named him Venture; the little boy had suddenly been transformed from a human being into a commodity. He was eight years old.

The historian Wilma King named her book about antebellum slave children Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), for obvious reasons: the lives of slave youngsters had been taken from them before they were born. The Native American and African children who appear in the essays in this section were also deprived of their traditional childhoods. Jamaican slave children shared Broteer’s virtually complete loss of childhood, while Indian children in Mexico and New England found their childhoods reshaped and their lives reorganized around values and institutions imposed on them and their families by European colonists. These essays, along with the eyewitness account of Native American childrearing and the excerpt from one of the few autobiographies of a native African caught in the web of American slavery, show the complications and tragedies that arose when Europeans, Africans, and indigenous Americans encountered one another. Colonialism unleashed economic and social forces that dramatically altered the assumptions and expectations of slave and native children. Schools not only changed how they learned but also what they learned; Puritan ideas about religion and gender collided with Native American notions in New England; and the plantation system forced children like Broteer/Venture into harsh economic roles. These processes, and the responses of native and African children to them, highlight the ways in which children became the targets of what one of the authors, Audra Diptee, calls the “colonial project.”

Chapter 1

Indian Children in Early Mexico

Dorothy Tanck de Estrada

The nation now known as Mexico was called New Spain from 1521 to 1821 when, in what is considered the colonial period, it was under the rule of the Spanish monarchs. During those three hundred years it became the most valuable possession of Spain, producing in the eighteenth century two-thirds of the world’s silver and a population of six million inhabitants —including 112,000 in Mexico City, the largest city in the Americas. Hundreds of different Indian groups formed the majority of the population. Prior to the arrival of the Spaniards, one of these native peoples, the Aztecs, had conquered the central area and spread their language and customs to much of the region.

As Philippe Ariès pointed out in his study of children in eighteenth-century France, knowledge of the society existing prior to that period is necessary in order for historians to understand later developments. In the case of New Spain, many aspects of the highly developed Indian civilization existing before 1521 continued to form a part of family and child rearing practices in later centuries, not only because of the demographic predominance of the natives but also because in a law established in 1555 the Spanish government allowed certain judicial, political, and social structures of the Indians to continue, as long as they were not in opposition to the Catholic faith or the sovereignty of the king.¹

Thus, the Indians were not expelled from the territory to the frontiers, but rather their pre-Hispanic settlements were recognized as Indian towns, “pueblos de indios,” and the Indians were allotted grants of land and given permission to elect their municipal Indian authorities. Approximately two thousand pueblos de indios were established in the sixteenth century, interspersed with Spanish settlements; by 1800 there were 4,468 legally recognized Indian towns, located from Chihuahua in the north to Yucatan in the south.²

Children in Aztec Mexico (1325–1521)

Ancient pictographic codices and archeological remains only depict scenes of military triumphs, descriptions of sacrifices to deities, lists of monarchs, and registers of tribute, making it difficult to explore the daily life of children in pre-Hispanic times. It was, in fact, after the Spanish conquest of Mexico that information on the social life of the Aztecs was obtained. The Catholic missionaries, realizing that they needed to understand the culture of the conquered in order to transmit the Catholic faith, learned the Aztec language (Náhuatl) and systematically collected data from native informants concerning the religion, government, laws, history, medicine, education, and customs of the Indians. This effort was carried out over a fifty-year period by the Franciscan friar, Bernardino de Sahagún, considered to be the founder of modern ethnography, who transcribed the information in Náhuatl with a resume in Spanish, thereby forming “one of our most precious windows into the structure and patterning of the New World’s most advanced indigenous civilization.”³

Sahagún’s sources reveal that mothers and children were highly regarded in Aztec society. Women who died in childbirth were compared to the soldiers who succumbed in battle: each was rewarded with the highest place in the afterlife. The newborn infant also received special attention. The umbilical cord was cut and buried under the hearth, if it was a girl, and in a field of battle, if a boy. All the time the midwife spoke to the baby in the most loving and concerned manner: “Precious necklace, precious feather, precious green stone, precious bracelet, precious turquoise. … Thou hast come to reach the earth, the place of torment, the place of pain.” Around the twentieth day, after consultation with the soothsayer, the child received its name as registered in the ritual calendar in accord with the month and day of its birth.⁴

At different moments in each child’s development, parents who cared for their children at home delivered formal, memorized speeches on the meaning of life and the way the child should behave. When the boy or girl was six years old, the age of discretion, each parent offered a didactic discourse to the offspring.

Here you are, my little daughter, my precious necklace, my precious quetzal feather, my human creation, born of me. You are my blood, my color, in you is my image. Now grasp, listen, you live, you were born, sent to earth by our lord … maker of humankind, creator of people…. Listen well, my little daughter, my little child, earth is not a place of well-being, there is no joy, there is no happiness. It is said that earth is the place of painful joy, of a joy that hurts.⁵

In these early years, specific chores were given to a boy according to his age. At four, to begin helping his father; at five, to carry wood; at six, to carry heavier things to market; at seven, to learn to fish with nets. These tasks continued, mixed with different types of punishments for bad behavior, such as being beaten with a stick, stuck with cactus spines, or having to inhale the smoke from burned chiles.⁶

Girls followed a similar pattern, learning to use the spindle whorl to twist yarn at age five and perfecting this skill until at thirteen they would grind maize, make tortillas, and learn to cook. At fourteen a girl began to weave maguey or cotton cloth on the back-strap loom, which was generally tied to a tree, a skill she would perfect over the years. Girls also received knowledge of plants and medicinal remedies. Children were urged to bathe frequently in cold water and in the hot vapors of the sweatbath when they were sick.⁷

The sons of the nobles studied and lived in the calmécac. Some entered at the age of five and others in early adolescence. A minority learned the sacred rites of the priestly class and most concentrated on legal and military studies. All had to gain understanding of the pictorial codices, decipher the sacred calendar, memorize historical and religious accounts, perfect their rhetorical skills, fast, and do physical penances. Martial arts and ceremonial dance were also part of the instruction. The youths participated in battles, attempting to take prisoners who would be sacrificed so as to guarantee the rising of the sun.

The sons of the commoners, when they were eighteen years old, attended for two years another type of school, the tepochcalli, where they trained for war, learned crafts, and carried out agricultural and construction projects. They also memorized ritual songs. Through manual labor and discipline, strong soldiers were prepared by the state. As in the calmécac, the students lived within the school.⁸

Adolescents of both sexes between the ages of thirteen and fifteen attended a “House of Song” where elderly men and matrons taught them the sacred chants and they practiced the ceremonial rhythmic steps of the ritual dances. The students lived at home and went to the school a few hours each day. These schools were in every neighborhood and town next to the temple. The adolescents learned to play the drums, flutes, conch shells, and trumpets for the frequent celebrations that lasted many hours and sometimes days. Some dressed as jaguars, eagles, or parrots, with feathered costumes and masks; all danced in unison to the beat of wooden drums. Some performances had up to a thousand participants. The music and song were generally slow and solemn for the nobles, and for the commoners, sometimes lively, humorous, and ribald. In one piece, young men donned masks of old men and danced in a hunched-back way, causing much laughter.⁹

Drawing of Aztec children entering the calmécac (school for nobles). The teacher is on the left and the father of the boys is on the right.

The home was the main educational center until the child was an adolescent. The dwelling consisted of one rectangular room without windows and a door opening onto the street. Apart, in the yard at the back, were a kitchen area and a sweat bath, where flowers, a vegetable garden, and songbirds also were found. Young boys dressed in a coarse knee-length white cape tied in a knot on their right shoulder. For recreation, they played with hard rubber balls, competed in hipball games, used blowguns or sling shots to kill birds, and practiced shooting small bows and arrows. At about age ten a loincloth was added to this attire and the youth let a tuft of hair grow on the back of his head. This was cut when the young man took his first prisoner of war, and if it was still there at the age of twenty he was ridiculed when he met adolescent females. Little girls used a wide, sleeveless tunic and a short wrap-around skirt, both of cloth woven at home. Their hair was worn loose. As the child grew older, her skirt was lengthened and when married she adopted a new hair-do of two rolls of hair that protruded on each side of her head like “horns.”¹⁰

All children were expected to be obedient, humble, and hard working. Their parents not only treated them with care but orally expressed to them love and tenderness, sentiments that are not revealed in the treatment given by other members of society to each other, at least not in ceremonial speeches. Children were considered treasures. Perhaps this was due to another aspect of Aztec thought: the fragility and fleetingness of life and the premonition that human existence was a dream. This fatalistic sentiment, combined with practices of warfare and human sacrifice, may have caused the families to give extreme value and attention to their children. Fray Diego de Duran in the sixteenth century wrote that “they are the people who love their children more than any nation in the world.”¹¹

Drawing of Aztec boys being taught by their teacher in the calmécac.

Indian Children during the Sixteenth Century

Into this society, where warfare and religion were paramount activities, came the Spaniards, who conquered the Indian empire in 1521, bringing to the New World their own forms of military and religious zeal. The first friar who arrived in New Spain was an exceptional Belgian, Pedro de Gante, a close relative of King Charles and a man of genius and self-abnegation. Soon after, in 1524, a group of twelve Franciscans disem-barked in Veracruz and walked barefoot to the city of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, where they were greeted by a kneeling Hernán Cortes. These priests were versed in the humanism of Erasmus, in the linguistic research promoted at the universities of Alcalá and Salamanca, and in the first Spanish grammar by Antonio de Nebrija. Many missionaries, upon perceiving the austere life of the Indians, desired to form a Catholic Church similar to that of the primitive Christianity practiced during the first centuries after Christ.¹²

Thus, the early missionaries wanted to isolate the Indians from the Spanish settlers, whom they considered violent, unjust, and immoral, like voracious sharks among minnows. However, the seven thousand Spaniards who populated the region during the sixteenth century amidst an Indian population of millions, wreaked havoc on the native civilization, due to the devastating mortality caused by imported European diseases, such as smallpox, measles, and typhoid, against which the natives had no natural immunity. The number of Indians dropped from approximately sixteen million to two million by the end of the century.¹³

The friars had two main objectives: to convert the Indians to the Catholic faith and to transmit knowledge and useful skills. To accomplish these aims, they learned to preach in the indigenous languages and employed specially taught native children.

New Spain was as linguistically varied as Europe, with twenty major tongues and well over one hundred minor dialects. The friars learned these languages by playing games with the Indian children during the day, discovering the sound and meaning of what they heard, and then, in the evening, writing in alphabetic form the strange words and their Spanish translations. Using Nebrija’s grammar as a guide, dictionaries and catechisms in the native languages were published in Mexico City, starting in 1539, “less than a century after the first work in Europe and more than a century before the first book in the British American colonies.” Among the early books was a guide for Indian parents for giving Christian instruction to their own children, the style of which followed the pattern of the repetitive, metaphorical style of the Aztec didactic speeches.¹⁴

A page from The Catechism of Pedro de Gante (ca. 1525) containing symbolic paintings, representing Christian doctrine and prayers, that resembled the Aztec codices.

Pedro de Gante prepared small books containing symbolic colored paintings of the prayers and doctrine, in a form similar to those of the pre-Hispanic codices. With the help of the Indians, the friars also wrote at least twenty theatrical pieces in Náhuatl. Similar to the medieval miracle plays, they were performed from 1533 to 1600. Real trees, live animals, and many actors, singers, and costumes recalled the Aztec performances.¹⁵

Following the instructions of the king, who recommended converting the children of the Aztec nobility to provide examples for the rest of the population, the Franciscans gathered together the sons of the nobles in their monasteries and taught them religion, music, reading, and writing in Náhuatl and Spanish. Some parents, disapproving of the new religion, hid their sons and sent their servants instead, thereby inadvertently contributing to the ascent of commoners to positions of power and responsibility.

Instruction for the rest of the children was carried out every day outside the church, either in the portals of the monastery, in the cemetery, or in special chapels in the atrium. The rudiments of faith and prayers were taught in the native languages. “Even in poorer parishes where there are no boys who know how to read, at prime and vesper time other poor boys come to teach them how to say the Pater Noster and Ave Maria and i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Philip J. Greven
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I Race and Colonization
• PART II Family and Society
• PART III Cares and Tribulations
• PART IV Becoming Americans
• Suggested Readings
• About the Contributors
• Index