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Michaël Roy,Young Abolitionists: Children of the Antislavery Movement

Bridget Bennett
Bibliographical reference

Michaël Roy, Young Abolitionists: Children of the Antislavery Movement, New York, New York University Press, 2024, ISBN: 9781479830091

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1Michaël Roy’s illuminating new book opens with a deft sleight of hand. He recounts the transformational moment when a young boy named Hal, visiting Dedham, Massachusetts with family members, has an awakening that will transform him into a young abolitionist. It is evidently an extraordinary experience; he tells his uncle, “I never had such a feeling of awe in my life.” (2) Traveling back from a day of participating in celebrations for Emancipation Day (marking the end of slavery in the British Empire) Hal says, “I think that if the men don’t all do something about slavery soon, we boys had better see what we can do, for it is too wicked.” (2) His day has included witnessing a banner-carrying procession accompanied by a group of child musicians and listening to the testimony of Lewis Clarke, a Kentucky fugitive who would publish his narrative a few years later. He also heard a thirteen-year-old boy, Charles Christopher Follen, recite from the work of the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier. It is a powerful opening full of fascinating detail. Yet Roy immediately reveals that Hal was not a real boy, and the story of his epiphany comes from Eliza Lee Follen’s “Pic Nic at Dedham”, a fictional text which first appeared in her juvenile magazine, the Child’s Friend. Follen, the abolitionist mother of the real Charles Christopher Follen, likely also participated in the event that she captured in her story. But Hal himself was an invented figure, one of the many imaginary abolitionist children who featured in the antislavery works circulating in the period, the most famous of which is Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852).

2This is a nice opening to a book characterised by the way it cleverly moves between imagined and historical children who are both in and out of the archives of abolition and antislavery. While drawing attention to the rich canon of work featuring “imagined child abolitionists” (5) such as Eliza Lee Follen’s protagonist Hal and Stowe’s Eva St Clare, Roy shifts focus to investigate the abolitionist work of real children. In doing so, he brings many new figures to our attention while tracing a world in which historical children were not just passive readers of abolitionist texts but were involved in a wide range of disparate activities. As he describes them, “Children recited antislavery speeches at school; they joined juvenile antislavery societies; they assisted in the editing of antislavery newspapers and in aiding fugitive slaves; they attended antislavery fairs and participated in programs to honor the memory of John Brown; they raised money to finance antislavery lecturers’ international travels; they even signed antislavery petitions, testing the limits of their citizenship.” (5) Their involvement was made possible because abolitionists “took children seriously” (174), something Roy contends we would do well to follow. This was because their ideas of childhood were drawn from the work of figures such as John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau who asserted the distinctiveness of childhood as a stage in life, enabling abolitionists to imagine it as weighted with possibility. Just as children could learn to discriminate on the basis of skin colour, they could also be taught that such discrimination was ideological, not natural. By envisaging them as capable of making informed and rational choices based on sympathetic reading of a range of evidence, adult activists were developing a generation of young abolitionists. Taking what he calls “a child’s-eye view of abolition” (6) Roy attends to familiar sources to seek out unfamiliar stories, focusing on overlooked voices including those of African American children.

3A notable feature of the book is his careful research in print sources. Its bibliography includes more than fifty 19th-century periodicals in addition to manuscript collections and its secondary sources include the work of historians and literary scholars. It is also generously illustrated, containing twenty-three images in total. These range from the title page of William Lloyd Garrison’s 1835 Juvenile Poems, for the Use of Free American Children of Every Complexion, a work clearly articulating its political commitment, to images enabling Roy to tell very specific stories, such as Nathaniel Bowditch’s copy of Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) given to him by his father in 1849 and inscribed, “Neither be, nor own, a slave!” (76) By focusing on this object, he argues that beyond offering “prescriptive discourse” (75) about what children should read, the gift is evidence of the reading practices of a specific child. It reveals what a real child actually read.

4In fact, the gift cannot itself be proof that Bowditch read Douglass’ work. One of the limitations of Roy’s work is that there is not always evidence of exactly how children were engaging with print. More work with scribal sources might give that kind of information though at the same time that would flatten out ideas of reading itself. Since acts of reading are varied in terms of commitment, skill and so on, claims to reading are themselves contingent. However, in this instance Roy engages with the absence of Nathaniel’s testimony creatively and sensitively, using evidence from Nathaniel’s father Henry Ingersoll Bowditch. The gift of Douglass’ Narrative is a thus starting point for Roy to recount the story of an abolitionist life. This life suggests the boy was brought up in such a way that he would have been a willing and attentive reader of abolitionist testimony.

5Nathaniel Bowditch was just nine years of age when his father gave him the Narrative. Three years earlier he had been taken to see the body of the abolitionist Charles T. Torrey who had died in jail. Henry Ingersoll Bowditch recounted in his journal that, “I raised the little fellow on my knee, and allowed him to look, and when I took him down he asked to be allowed to look once more. I then told him the history of the good man’s life, at which he seemed deeply interested.” (77) This is a telling moment in which the father’s instruction (by way of showing him an iconic figure) is immediately followed by his son’s request for a second look at the body. The teaching prompts a response in the form of a voluntary request. He continued to instruct his child, taking him (when he was just eleven) to a demonstration in support of the fugitive Thomas Sims. Twelve years after the gift of Douglass’ Narrative, Nathaniel Bowditch enlisted in the Union Army dying a year and a half later at the age of just twenty-three, meaning he would always remain a young abolitionist.

6Chapter One looks back to the ways in which abolitionists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries increasingly made children a focus for antislavery. Roy starts the chapter by reminding readers of the now familiar fact that some of the most celebrated antislavery figures, such as Frederick Douglass, developed their hatred of slavery while still children. Douglass would later write that “I was just as well aware of the unjust, unnatural, and murderous character of slavery, when nine years old, as I am now.” (14) He moves on to consider other examples of the way children responded not just to slavery but to other areas of reform. These included temperance, which he explains as a “more immediate blueprint for antebellum juvenile abolitionism” (9) than the sugar abstention championed by British activists. The Cold Water Army was founded in the 1840s and aimed to “enrol the names of all the children and youth in the country on the pledge of Total Abstinence from the use of all intoxicating drinks” (21) as the reformer Charles J. Warren announced. Some theorists of childhood argued that children learned from what they witnessed around them and in the spirit of developing their better instincts, they were encouraged to develop empathy and understanding as well as engage with overtly political work such as antislavery petitioning. But not all abolitionists agreed that this was an appropriate activity for minors. Lydia Maria Child, a distinguished and active figure who wrote juvenile antislavery works herself, argued that it was “improper” for children to be petitioning since they “are of necessity guided by others, and because this step is involved with questions evidently above juvenile capacities.” (39)

7Chapter Two turns to the ways that children’s sympathies were enlisted through, and by, print. Here Roy extends the important work of Deborah De Rosa, which focuses on the production of children’s antislavery writing by white women. Considerably expanding the archive of juvenile antislavery literature (one of his work’s real achievements) he reimagines what might constitute such work, encompassing Black and white authors, men and women, but also children. It includes “not just stories and poems by white abolitionists…but graphic accounts of slavery by the white slave rescuer Jonathan Walker, stories about racial prejudice by the Black activist Sarah Mapps Douglass and antislavery orations by students of the African Free Schools”. (46) As he correctly points out, this results in “an expanded canon of antislavery literature for children with truly radical – indeed, threatening – potentialities”. (47)

8Chapter Three turns to “the ephemeral world of juvenile antislavery societies” (82) to understand the ways that Black and white children turned to formal modes of organising to position themselves as serious contenders in the field. These societies, he argues, “prepared the young for active participation in the abolition movement later in their lives.” (82) This gives them an importance that exceeds the fact that many of them were not long-lived. However, there were differences between them. The Black leadership of African American societies not only encouraged antislavery activism but also urged young members to position themselves within the framework of categories such as “respectability and self-improvement” (83), a double burden for them but one necessary in a racist United States. Black girls and women were active in some of these societies. The Juvenile Anti-Slavery Society of Salem may have had a membership exclusively of young Black women while the first female antislavery society was also founded in Salem, once again by Black women. The skills they contributed included their sewing and they produced objects to be sold in an antislavery fair – a familiar pattern among women abolitionists, as Roy discusses elsewhere in the chapter. Indeed, in another welcome move he considers the relationship between abolition and other forms of campaigning, too, including peace activism.

9Chapter Four turns to consider what went on in schools and in classrooms, looking in detail at the kinds of texts used in early national and antebellum classrooms as well as the forms of pedagogy informing their use. While some of this is relatively familiar, it helps to explain the conditions within which juvenile abolition was fomented. Further, it gives a level of detail and evidence that makes the case he makes persuasive. In one lovely example Roy describes the way one Black schoolchild creatively reworked a poem by Hannah More in a public oration to make her condemnation of Britain into one of “Columbia”. (114) There is an exciting sense of agency and purpose here showing just how important engagement with texts and ideas was to the young abolitionists he studies.

10Finally, Chapter Five turns to four famous abolitionist families to “explore the intergenerational, intrafamilial transmission of antislavery values” (143). In doing this, Roy also shows the ways that abolitionist ideas were nurtured within homes, often by mothers in ways that have gone under-recognised, though this is now slowly changing as scholars shift their gazes from public antislavery activism, usually by men, to activism nurtured in less public spaces, usually by women. Acknowledging the importance of the work of feminist historians who have argued that “the domestic space as a site of political activism” (151), Roy turns to some of those sites, arguing that abolitionist mothers carried out some of their work in private and that “their children’s public antislavery labors testify to their otherwise invisible work”. (154) Writing in 1861, Sarah Parker Remond described her mother Nancy as inculcating her children with a precise knowledge of domestic and other habits noting that “[h]er aim seemed to be to guard, and at the same time strengthen her children, not only for the trials and duties of life, but also to enable them to meet the terrible pressure which prejudice against colour would force upon them”. (161) The public antislavery careers of Sarah Parker Remond and her brother Charles Lenox Remond suggest that this lesson served them both well, fortifying Sarah Parker Remond as she lectured to audiences comprised of men as well as women on both sides of the Atlantic.

11The epilogue starts with a front page headline from the “New York Times for Kids” on climate change, suggesting the important role of young readers (its intended readership is eight to thirteen years) in environmental activism. Shifting briefly from the social movements of the past to those of the present and future, Roy cites the example of Greta Thunberg in his closing reflections on the history of children’s involvement in progressive change. He then considers the relationship between 19th-century abolition and 20- and 21st-century environmental activism, something he rightly acknowledges has had critical attention. He cites Naomi Klein to reflect on the kinds of model abolition might pose for climate change activism. He then compares Thunberg with Anna Elizabeth Dickinson, who after a public career as an abolitionist starting when she was just thirteen, lectured on the administration’s slow progress to an audience of two thousand at the Capital when she was in her early twenties. The epilogue ends with a suggestion that we would be wise to “take a leaf out of the abolitionists’ book and listen to what young people have been trying to tell us.” (177)

12Though throughout the book Roy contends that for juvenile abolitionism “the category of age outweighed that of gender” (9), he might have probed more into the notable fact that both of these activists were young women. To what extent did/does their gender impact upon their striking demand to have their voices heard? Beyond that, by shifting from 19th-century abolition to contemporary climate change Roy overlooks the importance of children in the 20th-century civil rights movement, an obvious contender for the continuation of the energy behind abolition. Indeed, in his Introduction he argues that African American abolitionist children had more at stake when it came to abolition since for them it “was systematically intertwined with a broader struggle against segregation, disenfranchisement, and violence and for education, civil rights and social reform.” (7) Thinking about the legacies of abolitionists might have led to other moments and movements such as the 1963 Birmingham Children’s March involved more than five thousand children, numbers of whom were subsequently imprisoned. Famously, too, Ruby Bridges had to be guarded by federal marshals each day as she became the first African-American student at William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans.

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References

Electronic reference

Bridget Bennett, “Michaël Roy,Young Abolitionists: Children of the Antislavery MovementMiranda [Online], 31 | 2025, Online since 02 April 2025, connection on 17 February 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/65497; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/1410l

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About the author

Bridget Bennett

Professor of American Literature and Culture
University of Leeds, United Kingdom
b.k.g.bennett@leeds.ac.uk

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The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be subject to specific use terms.

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