Stolen Childhood:  Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America.  By Wilma King.  (Bloomington and Indianapolis:  Indiana University Press, 1995.  Pp. xxiv, 253.)

Professor of African American history at the University of Missouri-Columbia, Wilma King’s 1995 publication Stolen Childhood traces the lives of slave children and their place in the larger slave community in hopes of broadening knowledge of enslaved families of nineteenth century American South.  Starting from slave births and moving through several aspects of enslaved youth life, King concludes that youthful chattel missed many of the experiences that characterize childhood.  Instead, the institution of slavery stole the lives of the millions of slave children as owners forced children to mature and work at early ages, separated them from their families, and subjected them to what King terms as a war in which masters dominated the slaves.        

            In this topical study of slave youth, King first focuses on slave childbirth and the role of slave children in the larger community.  While most owners saw slave mothers’ offspring as profitable laborers, few provided any medical care for pregnant slaves or allowed them time off from their duties.  The larger slave community usually helped care for young children in nurseries, which shows the importance and acceptance of youth in the slave culture and the development of early relationships with community members.  Slave babies struggled with high mortality rates due to poor health, nutrition, and hygiene.  Although raising slave children proved difficult, parents tried to remain positive and buffer the abuses their children faced.     

            Next, King tackles the opposite issues of work and play.  King finds that no matter where slaves worked or what tasks they performed, they began working at early ages.  On Thomas Jefferson’s plantation, slave youth usually began working at ten years of age (22).  Parents had no input in the employment of their children, who performed a wide array of domestic, field, and service work.  According to testimony given to federal workers after the Civil War, many young slaves felt pride in their ability to work.  Some even described the domestic work as pleasant, although food preparation and washing clothes included heavy lifting, wood chopping, and long hours with no guarantee the owners would treat them well.  The vast majority of slaves worked in cotton and tobacco fields, which required many workers.  While working under the watchful overseers and owners, young slaves quickly learned to work together and with constraint.  Leisure time helped balance the children’s workload.  In the evenings, on Sundays, and during holidays, they rested, socialized, played, and developed interpersonal relationships.  Most slaves, King says, played similar games.  Citing WPA accounts, she identifies marbles, dolls, and jumping rope as some of the most popular games.  Using makeshift toys and their imaginations, yet aware of the discrepancy between toys of their white masters, slave children created games that reflected their lives.  Some games violently depicted dangers of slavery, such as auctions, while others mirrored domestic work (48).  Other leisure activities included dances, courtship, festivals, and marriage. 

Slaves also struggled to gain educations.  Many owners tried to dissuade slaves from learning, as literate slaves proved more difficult to control.  King points to an 1852 issue of Southern Planter to illustrate that appropriate behavior for enslaved children did not include gaining an education.  Instead, they needed to respect their positions as slaves.  Whether acquiring literacy through church and reading of the Bible or through service in a household, a tightening of restrictions after the Nat Turner rebellion led to only five percent literacy rates in the slave population by 1860.  Church spirituals and African stories also served as fountains of knowledge and strength for slaves.  Many youth experienced tragedies and traumas as chattel.  Fearful of owners’ abuses towards their own bodies and minds, they also had to witness whippings of their parents and separation of their families.  Slaves remained without recourse until passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.  As freedmen, blacks no longer plotted to run away from white masters, but they continued to struggle against them, protect their children from exploitation under the apprentice system, and attempt to reunite once broken families.  Freedom brought great joy as many black families began to support themselves economically and through education.       

            In this extensively researched book, King looks at several aspects of youth’s lives.  She mined several different types of sources, including government records, census returns, slave narratives, manuscripts, and interviews of ex-slaves from the Federal Writers Project of the 1930s, to construct her argument that slave children lacked a real childhood.  While her exhaustive research solidly places Stolen Childhood into a class of professional historical writing, King’s writing style easily lends itself and appeals to popular audiences.  The idea that slaves worked from an early age does not surprise most readers.  Yet, King’s deeper look at the muted parts of slave childhood and adolescence provides interesting details into the lives of this understudied population and shows an unclear line between childhood and maturity. 

Heather L. Yeargan

Texas Christian University

          “The purpose of this study is modest.  Its aim is to extricate enslaved children and youth from the amorphous mass of bond Servants.  Placing them in the foreground will help answer questions about enslaved families in nineteenth-century America.  Framing questions about youngsters and their place in the slave community will address issues such as those highlighted by historian Willie Lee Rose in 1970.  “The disturbing truth,” she wrote, “is that we know less than we ought to know about childhood in slavery, despite the significance psychologists and sociologists attribute to experiences of infancy and youth in development of personality.” (pg xvi)

King disputes the prevalent traditional histories depicting black slaves as childlike “Sambo” characters.  She takes to task these characterizations of myth and misconception of the black race and claims that the slave was anything but a child or ignorant being.  Her focus will explore the children of the slaves and explain their importance as a group during the nineteenth century.  This study addresses the following questions:  Do age groups have histories; what did youth mean in the nineteenth century; and has childhood changed over time.  According to the author, few historians have focused on the aspects of childhood during slavery.  She claims this group was an enormous population often ignored and long considered invisible to the historian.  The scholarship and research that exists concerning children of slaves is vague and subjective as King illustrates her interpretation of the black youths.

King borrows extensively from newspapers, government records, narratives, and a long bibliography drawing from authors such as Melville Herskovits, Herbert Gutman, John Blassingame, Eugene Genovese, and Thomas Webber, prominent African American historians, as she develops her thesis.  The title of her book Stolen Childhood explains the author’s view that black children virtually had no childhood due to the demands of slavery at a young age.  These children became a commodity and entered into a world of white authority, reprimand, and separation form their families early in life.  The book has seven chapters dealing with childbirth, slave labor, leisure activities, hardships and tragedies, children escaping from slavery, and transition from slavery to freedom.

Enslaved parents held the heavy burden of survival for themselves and for their enslaved children.  Women became the overseers of not only their own children but also other children within the slave community to ensure the survival of the black community living in bondage.  Using the documents of white owners King is able to reflect births, mortality rates, living conditions, health, and a development of the black culture.

Education was part of the leisure time activities and it was a means to instill in their children survival techniques, and knowledge that could allow children to understand the grave issues that faced the slave.  According to King, this allowed the child to maintain self-respect while paying reverence to white masters.  In the event that parents were separated from their children, this education could serve them well in the task of self-preservation.  Obedience, respect, and proper etiquette were required from the children of slave families.  It was not the sadistic style taught by white masters but more of an obedient demeanor required by black parents to ensure an understanding of the requirements of youth.

This book clearly depicts many of the difficult issues surrounding the youth born into a world of slavery.  It exemplifies the sad journey through the world of stolen adolescence and a heroic stance against great hardships laid upon a people held in bondage.  Through the teachings of adages, the children learned guidance among the whites and respect for themselves and those within their culture.  One example is as follows:  “Got one mind for the boss to see; got another that I know is me.”  The childhood of the slave lacked many nurturing elements allotted freepersons but it instilled into the black culture needed forms of resistance, self-respect, and intellectual abilities to deal with adverse situations at a very young ages.  This enabled the slave youth to prosper physically and intellectually and eventually pass on the traits taught by their parents to children of their own.  I would recommend this book for understanding the issues of children and their parents in slave communities.

 Jeff Tucker

Stolen Childhood: Slavery Youth in Nineteenth-Century America. By Wilma King. ( Indianapolis, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1995, Pp. xxi, 253.)

 In her work Stolen Childhood, Wilma King takes on the task of examining the lives of enslaved youth in the nineteenth century United States. Much work has been done on the lives of the slave family and their experiences, but no one has specifically focused on the slave youth. King’s argument is based on the idea that this group of enslaved youth had their childhood stolen from them for a variety of reasons: they were forces to go to work at an early age, they were forced to endure cruel punishment placed on both themselves and their parents, and in many cases, they were separated from their nuclear family. Though parents tried to offer their children skills to survive the unbearable conditions of slavery, witnessing the brutal life of slavery brought suffering to the lives of these children. King looks at the slave child’s experience by following the work, play and leisure, education, socialization, resistance to slavery, and the transition period immediately following the Civil War. She attempts to present a comprehensive analysis of both the horror and optimism felt by the slave child.

 King begins by examining the conditions under which slave children were brought into the world. Pregnant slave women received special treatment from their master’s as a result of the pregnancy in very few cases. There was little evidence connecting hard labor to miscarriages and slave women suffered a higher number of miscarriages than any other group during that period. Prenatal care was non-existent so the babies that were live births were born malnourished and underweight. It was not rare for a child to die before his or her first birthday. Young babies were of almost no value to the slaveholder because of their uncertain future. Babies were valued at about fifty dollars, compared to a child of five who could bring the master two hundred fifty dollars. The slaveholder did not provide sufficient food rations for children until they were able to go to work in some form and then their rations would double. The relationship between the slave child and their parents was one of a close bond, in which the parents took much abuse from the master or overseer in order to protect the child.

 As soon as a child was capable of doing any task, they were put to work. This seemed to be promoted by both the parents and the slaveholder. The parents knew this would bring more food and supplies into the household and the slaveholder encouraged this for more obvious reasons. Children as young as five years old were put to work in the fields doing clean-up work after their parents and in some cases, young girls were put in charge of the slave babies as this would give their parents more available working time. A young slave’s ability (value) was determined by the amount of work they could turn out in a day. This was often measured by the weight of cotton one could pick in a day. The more cotton they could pick, the more valuable they would become to the slaveholder.

 Slave children did experience time in which they were not required to work in the traditional fashion. Black and white children played together until about the ages of five or six. By this time the slave children were expected to go to work. The house servants were sometime beckoned to play with the white children when there were no other white children around to play with. King mentions one example in which a white boy has a new cart and his father request two slave boys to “play” with his son and daughter. The slave boys were tied to the front of the cart like horses and they had to pull the white children around while they whipped the two slave boys. This form of play was imitation of real life, which is a common occurrence in play by a child. The slave children did find ways to improvise since they did not own toys. They used their imaginations and the resources available to them, such as trees and acorns, to devise their own toys. Leisure time was also important to slaves, especially the period between Christmas and New Years as this was the time when families that had been separated throughout the rest of the year could come together and spend time together as a family unit. The slaves would often cook their most lavish meals of the year and sing songs and just celebrate in general. These times brought up the fondest memories for those slaves interviewed in the 1930s by the WPA.

 Education and religion were intertwined with one another in the lives of slave children. Literacy was predominantly learned in order to read the bible, but there were cases of slaveholders and even more so, of their children teaching slave children to read. It was not a common phenomenon, but there were schools set up by slave mistresses for their slaves. Religion played an integral part in the life of slaves, including Christianity but there were other practices that lent to the survival tactics of slaves. Voodoo and other African religions were practiced among slave groups.

 Intimidation of slave children was ever present in their daily lives.  This caused much grief for slave parents as well as for their children. Children were whipped not only as punishment for acts that they committed, but also as an intimidation factor for their parents. Children who worked on tobacco plantations were forced to eat the worms that they overlooked as they picked them off the tobacco leaves. These were everyday occurrences for many slave children. Girls had to exercise special caution as to avoid sexual abuse from both the slaveholder and the overseer. Many times their clothes were revealing because of the inadequate clothing supply for slave children. The children suffer no more or less abuse from their superiors than the adult slaves did.

 King goes on to talk about escaping from slavery, but she contends that children were rarely among those who escaped from plantations. Most of the escapees were adult males. This is the weakest part of the book as she uses instances of adults and their escape methods and drifts away from her original intention of exploring the child's life in slavery. She carries this into the final chapter of the book and moves away from a child-focused discussion.

Wilma King is a Professor of History at Michigan State University and has published other volumes dealing with the issue of slavery.

Sharon Romero