FIELD, Corinne T, “Why Little Thinkers Are a Big Deal: The Relevance of Childhood Studies to Intellectual History,” Modern Intellectual History, vol. 14, no. 1, 2017, p. 280.
Michaël Roy, Young Abolitionists : Children of the Antislavery Movement
Michaël Roy, Young Abolitionists : Children of the Antislavery Movement, New York, New York University Press, 2024, 264 pages, ISBN: 978-1-4798-3009-1, 38 $.
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1Children are brought to the fore with this new history of the abolition movement. Michaël Roy’s Young Abolitionists: Children of the Antislavery Movement delves into 19th-century childhood to try and understand how youngsters could have been both recipients and agents in the American abolitionist movement from its first wave at the end of the 18th century to the Civil War. If children’s involvement in social movements has already been studied with more contemporary organizations like the civil rights movement, their engagement in abolitionism has never been properly looked at.
2What can this new perspective bring to the scholarship on abolitionism, an already well-researched field of study? The interest in children as a new category of analysis has emerged with the development of the field of childhood studies in the late 20th century, arising from the growing recognition of children as active social agents rather than passive recipients of adult influence. Writing the history of children’s involvement in the abolitionist movement thus offers a fresh perspective, that of a social group that has often been overlooked and that is in keeping with the new historiographical trend of writing history from the margins. Looking at familiar sources, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin written by Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1852, that are often studied by literary scholars, Michaël Roy puts them into historical context to understand their impact on children. He also looks at sources that were not necessarily written for children, like slave narratives, digs into their context of reception and shows that they were actually read by children. The strength of this book is indeed the double perspective at the crossroads of childhood studies and intellectual history, looking both at the richness of the literature children were acquainted with thanks to the development of print culture and at the realities of a child’s life in the antebellum years.
3So how come children were seen as potential allies in the antislavery cause? First, they were an ideal target because as Locke had put it, they were considered as “tabula rasa, or blank slate, waiting to be shaped by experience and education” (28), so could easily be influenced by anti-slavery thoughts. The perception of children had evolved with the Enlightenment, moving away from the Puritans’ belief in children’s sinful nature to an emphasis on their innocence and purity. Therefore, they were considered to be naturally color-blind and have “a natural detestation of violence and oppression” (3), and “would instinctively perceive the iniquity of such a system [slavery] and might be persuaded to do something against it” (3). Abolitionists also had to fight the belief that only white children were innocent and pure, Black children being “exiled from innocence and with it, from childhood—and humanity” (78). The need to act with children was thus all the more important since they could convert other children and adults. As such, they were used as a political weapon against slavery and racism.
4The book is organized in five chapters, each subdivided into 3 parts, showing the extent of the domains in which children had an influence. Chapters are carefully structured, each ending with a passage dedicated to the resistance to the movement and the enrollment of children. The first chapter gives some background about children’s involvement in other social movements like the Temperance movement with the creation of the Children of the Temperance Movement in the mid-1820s, or the belief that children were able to convert their irreligious parents and bring them to Church. It also goes back to the first wave of abolitionism right after the Independence, in which enslaved children were the first actors. The focus was then education and the need to prove that African Americans were not inferior and unfit for freedom, with for instance the establishment of the New York African Free School (NYAFS) in 1787 by the New York Manumission Society.
5The second chapter delves into juvenile antislavery literature that could have motivated children’s engagement, works authored by both white and Black activists, looking at a great variety of texts—stories, poems, orations, dialogues, slave narratives (like the publication in 1829 of The Life and Adventures of Olaudah Equiano, a twenty-five-page abridgement of the slave narrative published in 1789 by Abigail Mott), eyewitness accounts—that could be found either in columns of the antislavery press (in The Juvenile Department of The Liberator for instance), or children’s periodicals like The Slave’s Friend (1836-1838) or The Juvenile Miscellany (1826-1836). What is interesting is that some of them were not purposely written for children but were read by them as there was no strict division between juvenile and adult literature in the 19th century. Michaël Roy insists on the radicality of this literature as it resorted to crude details about slavery, discussed the social and political implications of the slave system as well as the ensuing racism, and enticed children to take action by helping fugitives, refusing to eat candy made with slave-produced sugar, or distributing abolitionist pamphlets. Others were more directly addressed to African American children, focusing on the benefits of education and morality to combat racial prejudice. In this literature, children were considered rational beings that could act as enlightened and autonomous citizens.
6The third chapter looks at the activist side of abolitionism, exploring juvenile white-led and Black-led antislavery societies. A fact rarely known, children mimicked their parents by forming their own antislavery associations, mainly between 1831 and 1838. Usually with the help of more mature abolitionists, children learned about petitioning, speech-making, and fund-raising, skills that would serve them into adulthood. Black-led groups like the Juvenile Garrison Independent Society (JGIS), or the Garrison Literary and Benevolent Association (GLBA) focused on education and racial uplift rather than the abolition of slavery in order to “to foster an ethos of respectability and self-improvement” among newly freed African Americans (82).
7The fourth chapter interrogates the extent of abolitionist influence in schools as education was at the core of the abolitionist project. It examines the way instructors addressed slavery and racial prejudice, some, more conservative, keeping away from it, while others severely denounced it, having their pupils write antislavery compositions, sing antislavery songs, and deliver antislavery orations. African American teachers like Susan Paul also strove to show the importance of education for Black children. Pupils in the New York African Free School were given the necessary skills to participate in current political debates. Textbooks published in the North had a strong abolitionist orientation to the point that they were targeted by Southerners, who tried to prevent their publication in Dixieland.
8The fifth chapter details the influence of abolitionism within the family unit. Children were under the direct influence of their parents and more specifically their mothers, who assisted them in their various tasks, like editing newspapers, collecting signatures for petitions, or aiding fugitive slaves by taking part in the Underground Railroad. Michaël Roy has chosen four abolitionist couples to show how they interacted with their children: William Lloyd Garrison and Helen Benson Garrison, Frederick Douglass and Anna Murray Douglass, Elizabeth Buffum Chace and Samuel Buffington Chace, and John Remond and Nancy Lenox Remond. Even if careers are hard to reconstruct, he tries to look at what these young abolitionists became during and after the war, wondering if they perpetuated their social engagement. Some did not necessarily become activists, while others enlisted in the Union army or were engaged in other movements like women’s rights. Nancy Remond, for her part, was blocked by her class and gender, which is an interesting fact because as Michaël Roy showed, children of both sexes were equally exposed to abolitionist influence and took part similarly in the movement, but their roles started to differ when they grew up as young adults. Still others acted against their parents’ wishes, like Lewis Douglass, who joined a colonization project in Central America despite Frederick Douglass’s virulent opposition to state-sponsored colonization.
9Studying childhood necessarily induces several questions. The first one is the definition of children. Who was considered a child in the 19th century? What about teenagers? Did the category exist at the time and was it included in the study? Michaël Roy does not give a straight answer, defining a child as “anyone who was regarded as such by their contemporaries or who self-identified as a child” (9). In this work, children are rather considered politically. They are younger people who went to school, who could read and write, and were still under the influence of their parents, a rising generation who did not yet have the right to vote but who nevertheless became political actors, fighting slavery and racism in their states. Another important question is the notion of agency. If children are key because they can easily be influenced, one can wonder about the extent of their autonomy. Were children acting consciously and out of their own will? This may be difficult to answer but Michaël Roy is persuaded that they were genuine producers of antislavery thinking, “intellectuals in their own right” (6, borrowed from Corinne T. Field), convinced actors of the movement as long as they contested racial injustice whatever the means. Finally, one last question is the relevance of the sources as children’s voices were often mediated. Again, Michaël Roy clearly explains that he was able to track down sources in which authentic children’s voices could be heard—testimonies in the Slave’s Friend, or memoirs—especially those of African American children for whom abolitionism took a more personal note.
10Through the focus on children, we do understand how easy it was for abolitionists to convince these virgin spirits of the atrocity of slavery and the need to fight inequality, but we may wonder how representative these children were among the American population. If abolitionists only accounted for a tiny minority of the population of the North, how influential could these children have been on the overall population? In this study, Michaël Roy does not omit to mention that abolitionism was not shared by all, and that abolitionists were subjected to many attacks, as for instance when they enrolled children in the signing of antislavery petitions, being condemned for “destroying their sacred innocence” (41). He also mentions the publication of Southern magazines like Rose Bud, which indoctrinated children with racial hatred and the defense of slave-ownership, or the way Southerners attacked Northern textbooks. Yet, as Donald Yacovone has shown in his book Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal (New York: Pantheon Books 2022), racism and white supremacy were deeply entrenched in Northern people’s minds and culture. Black codes, segregation of public places, race riots, fear of racial mixing, racial stereotyping were not infrequent in the North. Northern publishers in the 1850s chose to censor some passages about the history of slavery in textbooks in order to maintain their Southern market. If Black families were inevitably favorable to abolitionism, being more or less active in the movement, we can just wonder how engaged white families were and how representative the Garrisons are for instance.
11In this context of racial violence, fashioning children’s minds was thus a proof of the movement’s radicality. It was a necessary step despite children’s strong emotional reactions. The author only briefly alludes to the fact that “juvenile antislavery literature and the archives of the abolition movement are full of children who were likewise moved to tears when their parents or teacher or an antislavery lecturer discussed slavery with them” (78). This argument, he concedes, was used by critics who condemned abolitionists for traumatizing the children, corrupting their innocence, but more cases detailing their emotional and psychological reaction (with personal testimonies?) would have added weight to his demonstration. The history of slavery has indeed long been sugarcoated in part—not only—to avoid having to face a disturbing reality. Abolitionists must have been aware of the graphic and cruel details they were exposing children to, but that was part of their strategy, shocking to foster empathy and outrage, and entice people to react.
12More than children, the object of this book is really transmission, heritage, and the way mentalities can be fashioned in order to nip racial hatred in the bud. This is what the title, Children of the antislavery movement, also suggests—children taking part in the movement as well as the movement’s heirs. Of all times, children have been seen as the hope of a whole generation during times of crisis, after wars, shootings, pandemics or the current crisis of climate change, which Michaël Roy stresses in his epilogue with the relevant example of Greta Thunberg. More than the history of abolitionism, this book enables to realize that slavery did not end in 1865 and that the fight still had to be fought for decades after emancipation through the engagement of abolitionists’ descendants. As Henry Clarke Wright foresaw in 1837, they were “engaged in a work not to be done in a day, … You, and I, and all engaged in this fearful struggle, will soon pass away. Let us, then, prepare our children for the part they must take in it when we are dead” 10). Today’s attacks from conservatives on schools and textbooks are just another proof of this.
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Anne-Claire Faucquez, « Michaël Roy, Young Abolitionists : Children of the Antislavery Movement », Transatlantica [En ligne], 2 | 2024, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2024, consulté le 08 février 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/23674 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/134hp
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