Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America

By Wilma King

An updated edition of the classic study that took “an enormous step toward filling some of the voids in the literature of slavery” (The Washington Post Book World).

One of the most important books published on slave society, Stolen Childhood focuses on the millions of children and youth enslaved in 19th-century America. This enlarged and revised edition reflects the abundance of new scholarship on slavery that has emerged.

Wilma King has expanded its scope to include the international dimension with a new chapter on the transatlantic trade in African children, and the book’s geographic boundaries now embrace slave-born children in the North. She includes data about children owned by Native Americans and African Americans, and presents new information about children’s knowledge of and participation in the abolitionist movement and the interactions between enslaved and free children.

“A jarring snapshot of children living in bondage. This compellingly written work is a testament to the strength and resilience of the children and their parents.”—Booklist on the first edition

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 29, 2011
• ISBN: 9780253001078

Book preview

Stolen

Childhood

BLACKS IN THE DIASPORA

FOUNDING EDITORS

Darlene Clark Hine

John McCluskey, Jr.

David Barry Gaspar

EDITORIAL BOARD

Herman L. Bennett

Kim D. Butler

Judith A. Byfield

Leslie A. Schwalm

Tracy Sharpley-Whiting

Stolen

Childhood

Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America

WILMA KING

SECOND EDITION

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Bloomington & Indianapolis

This book is a publication of

Indiana University Press

601 North Morton Street

Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA

iupress.indiana.edu

Telephone orders  800-842-6796

Fax orders  812-855-7931

Orders by e-mail    [e-mail]

First edition published 1995

© 2011 by Wilma King

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Manufactured in the United

States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-

in-Publication Data

King, Wilma, [date]-

Stolen childhood : slave youth in nineteenth-century America / Wilma King. — 2nd ed.

p. cm. — (Blacks in the diaspora)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-253-35562-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-22264-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Slavery—United States—History—19th century. 2. Child slaves—United States—History—19th century. 3. African American families—History—19th century. 4. Slaves—Emancipation—United States. 5. United States—History—19th century. I. Title.

E441.K59 2011

306.3’62083—dc22

2010043634

1    2    3    4    5    16    15    14    13    12    11

To the memory of my father

and for his children, and their children

and their children, and …

The slave population, as you remark, has had vast influence on the past, and may affect the future destinies of America, to an extent which human wisdom can neither foresee nor control.

Timothy Pickering to the Honorable John Marshall, January 17, 1826

CONTENTS

•  Preface to the Second Edition

•  Acknowledgments

•  Introduction

•  List of Abbreviations

1 In the Beginning: The Transatlantic Trade in Children of African Descent

2 You know I am one man that do love my children: Slave Children and Youth in the Family and Community

3 Us ain’t never idle: The Work of Enslaved Children and Youth

4 When day is done: The Play and Leisure Activities of Enslaved Children and Youth

•  Illustrations

5 Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave: Temporal and Spiritual Education

6 What has Ever become of my Presus little girl: The Traumas and Tragedies of Slave Children and Youth

7 Free at last: The Quest for Freedom

8 There’s a better day a-coming: The Transition from Slavery to Freedom

•  Notes

•  Appendices

•  Bibliography

•  Index

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

During the intervening years since the publication of Stolen Childhood in 1995, an abundance of scholarship on slavery has appeared and enriched our knowledge about the institution of slavery across geographical regions and about enslaved children who came of age before 1865. For example, it is now known that the number of youthful Africans transported into the New World was greater than many had believed previously. In fact, the estimates range from one-fourth to one-third to the total. Moreover, a variety of sources, including Erik Hofstee’s dissertation The Great Divide: Aspects of the Social History of the Middle Passage in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (CD-ROM), narratives by Middle Passage survivors, and the special edition of Slavery and Abolition 27 (August 2006), make data about enslaved children more readily available than ever before. As a result, this work devotes attention to the transatlantic trade in African children in the chapter titled ‘In the Beginning’: The Transatlantic Trade in Children of African Descent.¹

Another rationale for including a chapter about the transatlantic trade is the sheer number of children transported and the fact that youngsters were sought after by captains interested in filling their holds quickly with affordable chattel. And after the United States ended its participation in the overseas trade in Africans, an illegal trade continued and children remained a likely choice in the business of buying, transporting, and selling Africans.

The scope of Stolen Childhood has been increased in another way to include slave-born children in the North. The abolition of slavery in the Revolutionary War era and provisions for its gradual demise tend to obscure the existence of slavery in the North. A look at northern bondage reveals complexities in households in which children who were born before gradual abolition laws became effective remained enslaved while their siblings born afterward were destined for freedom. Furthermore, the fluidity in urban slavery shaped the nature of bondage for children. One needs to look no further than Stephen Whitman’s Diverse Good Causes: Manumission and the Transformation of Urban Slavery to see that enslaved and emancipated blacks were not completely separate entities.²

The changes in the geographical scope of this text make it possible to examine interactions between free, freed, and enslaved children across regions. In the process, it becomes clear that freeborn and emancipated persons were not entirely aloof from their enslaved contemporaries. In fact, few, if any, freeborn or freed persons in the North or South did not have a relative or friend who remained in bondage. This study looks at interactions between enslaved and free children as well as the extent of each group’s knowledge about the existence of its counterpart.

This edition of Stolen Childhood attempts to move away from the notion that slavery was a southern plantation phenomenon in which white planters owned scores of black children and adults. To that end, it includes data about children owned by Native Americans and African Americans. The number of slaveholders of color and the size of their holdings were relatively small, yet they should not be dismissed. That Africans and African Americans owned other Africans or African Americans for economic and benevolent reasons is an integral part of this history.

Finally, the original study devoted little attention to children’s knowledge of or participation in the abolitionist movement. Since the time the first edition was published, the scholarship of Lois Brown has made the participation of children, witting or unwitting, in Susan Paul’s abolitionist choirs impossible to ignore. Similarly, Molly Mitchell’s research highlighting free children in New Orleans provided data to show that teachers influenced their pupils’ thinking and sensitized them about the existence of slavery. The same can be said about schools for black children in New York and Cincinnati.³

Aside from these additions, the intent and structure of Stolen Childhood remain unchanged.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History’s 71st annual convention provided the first opportunity to discuss this work publicly; however, I canceled the October 18, 1986, presentation because of my father’s sudden death. It is ironic that the funeral services fell on the same afternoon of the scheduled presentation. Afterward, Sheila Miller, a librarian at East Pike Elementary School in Indiana, Pennsylvania, invited me to share my research with the sixth graders there. I protested, saying that I was not writing a book for children; rather, it was about children. Sheila insisted that the pupils would understand and appreciate my work. I agreed and was delighted to find the students at East Pike and subsequently at Eisenhower Elementary School, also in Indiana, Pennsylvania, truly interested in knowing about the lives of enslaved children in nineteenth-century America. They posed questions that only children of their ages could ask. Their inquiries were helpful.

I owe huge debts of gratitude to colleagues who kept an eye out for materials relevant to my research. Special thanks go to Darlene Clark Hine and David Barry Gaspar for their comments and encouragement in the early stages of research. Michael P. Johnson, Linda Reed, and Howard V. N. Young, Jr., provided beneficial comments after reading the entire manuscript. Robert L. Hall generously shared Prolegomena to a Social History of Slave Whippings in the United States, Jacqueline Goggin provided a chapter from her biography of Carter G. Woodson, and Lee Formwalt brought the Polly Ann Johnson case to my attention. My debts to these historians can never be repaid adequately. Other colleagues and friends shared research or provided pertinent references; my thanks to Edward Ayers; Richard Corby; Marcia Darling; Charlotte Fitzgerald; Beverly Guy-Sheftall; William H. Harris; Barbara Hill Hudson; Norrece T. Jones, Jr.; Irwin Marcus; Stanley Warren; and Hoda Zaki.

Without assistance from staff in the manuscript collections at Duke University, Hampton University, Louisiana State University, the University of Virginia, and the College of William and Mary, my work would remain incomplete. Archivists at the Library of Congress, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, the National Archives and Records Administration, the North Carolina Office of Archives and History, the Southern Historical Collection, the Virginia State Library, and the Wisconsin Historical Society were equally helpful.

I owe special thanks to librarians at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, including Mary Sampson, director of the Interlibrary Loan Office; Richard Chamberlin, reference librarian; and Walter Laude, director of technical services. Thanks also to the student assistants in their offices.

Financial support came from several sources. In the initial stage of research, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded a travel to collections grant that introduced me to the Southern Historical Collection at Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and Public Policy, Charlottesville, Virginia, granted a summer residency in 1987 that enabled me to use the special collection at the University of Virginia library. The 1991 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminars for College Teachers, Slavery and Freedom, at the University of California, Irvine, under the direction of Michael P. Johnson, provided financial support and a work environment while I completed research for the last chapter of this book. Indiana University of Pennsylvania’s Department of History, Faculty Senate, and Graduate School were generous with both research support and release time. Michigan State University provided release time during the 1991–1992 academic year for the completion of this book.

Undergraduate assistants Kim Ault, Andrew Conroy, and Kellee Durkin along with graduate assistants Carole Occhuizzo, James Koshan, Gary Link, and Gary Denholm at Indiana University of Pennsylvania willingly and cheerfully helped with many of the details for this manuscript.

Since the publication of Stolen Childhood in 1995, I have been the recipient of unbounded generosity from a community of historians and others. They have showered me with citations for manuscripts, books, and articles about enslaved and emancipated children of African descent. I have long believed that the best way to recognize the largess is by acknowledging each individual in citations for the materials provided. I do hope you will see not only your name in the notes but how I used your gift. Thank you.

The assistance from colleagues and friends at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Michigan State University, and the University of Missouri have helped in immeasurable ways to bring this work to fruition. And as usual, my family provided the kind of aid and support that only a family can and will. I am grateful. When combined, the assistance from others is bountiful enough for me to bear all criticism regarding the merit of this work alone.

INTRODUCTION

Most slave societies in the New World used massive importations of Africans to maintain their populations. The exception was the United States, which replaced its slave population through births. Less than 1,000,000 adults and children were imported into the country before the transatlantic trade in Africans ended in 1808. Although enslaved children fell into an actuarially perilous category, the population had increased to 3,952,760 by 1860. Of that population, 56 percent were under twenty years old. The ability of the U.S. slave population to reproduce itself is the most distinctive feature of slavery in North America. This factor alone makes a study of enslaved children and youth important because the majority of those in bondage in the United States by the time of the Civil War had been born in North America rather than in Africa. They survived the institution of slavery because their teachers drew upon their own first-hand experiences in bondage to teach children survival skills. Enslaved persons used the deference ritual as a survival strategy.¹

The purpose of this study is modest. Its aim is to extricate children and youth from the amorphous mass of bondservants. Placing them in the foreground will help answer questions about enslaved families in the nineteenth-century South. 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.²

Power in antebellum America rested in the hands of whites, many of whom viewed slaves, regardless of their ages, as children. In 1963, historian Stanley M. Elkins described the Sambo figure, which he attributed to southern lore. Elkins claimed that the relationship between slaveholders and slaves was marked by [the slave’s] utter dependence and childlike attachment: it was indeed this childlike quality that was the very key to his being. Even a hint of Sambo’s manhood would fill the slave-owner with scorn, while the child, ‘in his place,’ could be both exasperating and lovable. After the Civil War, a former slaveholder described her slaves, who had included an adult man and two women, as like so many children to be clothed & nursed & fed & … constantly to be looked after.³

The idea that persons of African descent were like gullible children prevailed into the twentieth century and prompted anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits to address it as the first of five misconceptions presented in his book The Myth of the Negro Past. The author summarized the details of the first myth: "Negroes are naturally of a childlike character, and adjust easily to the most unsatisfactory social situations, which they accept readily and even happily, in contrast to the American Indians, who preferred extinction to slavery. One of Herskovitz’s objectives was to debunk such myths through presenting extensive research about Africans and their descendants and contemporary examples from nationalistic movements in Africa. For the Negro in the United States, he wrote, Ghana has become a symbol; in the face of the achievement of Africans, the distortions in the caricature of the Africans and their ways of life … no longer carry conviction to serious students. Herskovits was clear in his conclusions that Africans and their descendants were neither childlike in their behavior nor credulous. Far from being childlike" throughout their lives, slaves were forced to confront adult situations of work, terror, injustice, and arbitrary power at an early age.⁴

Surprisingly, the volume of published work on children is quite large. Researchers in many disciplines, including women’s history, sociology, anthropology, labor history, the history of medicine, and literary criticism, have demonstrated an interest in the subject. One of the most ambitious studies about the young, Children and Youth in America, appeared in 1970. It is a massive work that includes white, African American, and Native American children, but it is a history of public policy for children rather than a history that deals with the realities of human growth and development. A more recent work edited by N. Ray Hiner and Joseph M. Hawes, Growing Up in America, comes nearest to studying children in a comprehensive manner. Other publications about the black family in America include discussions about slavery, but none of the studies emphasize the presence of youthful chattel.⁵

Data on slave children exist in general studies of slavery such as John W. Blassingame’s The Slave Community, Herbert Gutman’s The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll, Leslie Owens’s This Species of Property, and Thomas L. Webber’s Deep Like the Rivers, but they do not fully address many questions of interest, such as those related to child-rearing practices of nineteenth-century African Americans; relationships between children and their parents, siblings, and peers; and other subjects.⁶

The resources for such a study are vast, but the data must be culled from newspapers, dissertations, theses, scholarly journals, court records, census returns, and published primary sources along with unpublished diaries, plantation records, and manuscripts of antebellum planters, travelers, and observers of social, economic, and political conditions in America. Furthermore, slave narratives, including those of Solomon Northup, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs, and the voluminous collection of interviews from the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s (notwithstanding criticisms by many historians of this resource) offer the best sources of primary data about former slaves. The majority of the former slaves interviewed for the Federal Writers Project were children and youth less than twenty years old when slavery ended.

Despite this vast array of resources pertinent to a study of enslaved children and youth, few historians have stressed this aspect of slavery. Children have received little attention because they, more than other enslaved persons, were silent and invisible. This enormous population did not write or speak for itself and was often ignored by others. The size of the youthful population, the fact that most of them were born in the United States, and the fact that they survived make such a study all the more meaningful. Children’s history has come of age, and there is now greater interest in the black child than ever before.⁷

Studies of the young must address the questions: Do age groups have histories? What did concepts of youth and adolescence mean in the nineteenth century? and Has childhood changed over time? Some scholars argue that adolescence is a modern concept and that no systematic body of literature existed that included the word adolescence until the twentieth century. Aside from the storm and stress of teenage years, adolescence is the period between the onset of sexual maturity and full incorporation into the economic sphere.⁸

In the nineteenth century, the time lag between those two intervals functioned differently for white boys and girls, regardless of whether they were poor or wealthy, and their black counterparts. White middle- and upper-class boys often left home to receive a formal education when they reached their early teens, thereby delaying their entry into the world of work. They enjoyed a distinctive period of youth. Some poor white boys became apprentices and also had an adolescence of sorts. It was a different matter for white girls, since no significant social role existed for them outside of marriage; consequently, they experienced no prolonged time set aside for adjustments to responsibilities.⁹

Furthermore, this discourse is complicated by historical records that do not distinguish clearly between enslaved adults and children. Social customs rather than chronological age determined if one called a bondservant boy or girl. Consider the lack of clarity in the matter from a nineteenth-century slaveholder:

I have an unruly negro girl whom I am anxious to dispose of as soon as possible and supply her place. Will you be so good as to look out for me a breeding negro woman under twenty years of age. Also a young active negro man. If you cannot meet with the slaves aforesaid I will be willing to purchase a young or middle aged negro man with his wife and children. I shall be glad to hear from you immediately as the negro of who I wish to dispose is a very dangerous character.

How old is the girl in question? It is not clear. The age difference between the young active man and a young negro man with wife and children is also unclear.¹⁰

Age was important in shaping a sense of self, yet those in question did not speak about themselves in age-specific terms. Kept ignorant deliberately, slaves often gauged their age by their size or memorable events. Booker T. Washington knew that he was born near Hale’s Ford, Virginia, but he did not know the month or the day. South Carolinian Calib Craig explained it this way: Dont none of us know de day or de place us was born. Us have to take dat on faith. Lucy Daniels was unclear about her date of birth: I don’t know how old I been when de war end. If I been in de world I wasn’t old enough to pick up nuthin’. Sylvia Cannon said, I just ain’ able to say bout my right age.¹¹

Richard A. Wright, author of African Philosophy, notes that most Yorubas did not know their age but dated their existence by events since age without events made little sense. Such behavior was normal for the Yorubas but incompatible for nineteenth-century African Americans because many of the cultural events that might have been used as markers were no longer possible. Douglass lamented that the larger part of the slaves know as little of their age as horses know of theirs. By contrast, he noted that The white children could tell their ages. Douglass was not alone in recognizing the injustice of being deprived of the same privilege.¹²

Although many white children knew their age, there was flexibility about who was an adult in nineteenth-century America. Twenty-one years of age was usually considered the end of upper adolescence and the beginning of adulthood. Even so, white males were considered to be adults at eighteen in some cases and at twenty-one in others. Slaveholders often considered bondservants to be adults when they became full hands at age sixteen or younger. The onset of menarche was a factor that catapulted the girls into adulthood.¹³

The 1850 Census of the United States divided slaves into groups consisting of those below five years of age under the heading Infancy, while the second category, Youth, included those from five to twenty years of age. Gradual abolition laws delineated the ages at which slaves were to receive their freedom. Once freed, minor apprentices remained bound to employers until eighteen and twenty-one years of age for females and males respectively. I have used age-specific data with eighteen and twenty-one as the upper limits for females and males respectively. On occasions when the data are unclear or there are exceptions, I call the reader’s attention to this matter to maintain the integrity of the study.¹⁴

Stolen Childhood argues that enslaved children had virtually no childhood because they entered the workplace early and were subjected to arbitrary authority, punishment, and separation, just as enslaved adults were. These experiences made them grow old before their time. Although parents tried to protect their offspring, children learned at a young age that mothers and fathers were vulnerable to cruelties. Childhood and adulthood were closely linked during slavery; the experiences of children and adults were comparable to those suffered by people living in a nation under siege.

Olaudah Equiano, who was taken from Africa when he was eleven, experienced the pain of separation from his family and place of birth. When fear of the unknown engulfed the child, a shipmate comforted him. As a freedman, Equiano reflected upon youth in slavery and posited:

When you make men slaves you deprive them of half their virtue, you set them in your own conduct an example of fraud, rapine, and cruelty, and compel them to live with you in a state of war.

Slaveholders created an environment in which slaves, young and old, were willing to fight until they became independent of deprivations imposed by others. That state of war existed until slavery ended.¹⁵

If slavery is analogous to war, a look at the lives of children who experienced war should provide a better understanding of the ordeals of the most vulnerable victims. Children, because of their inability to protect themselves from devastation, suffer intensely from both slavery and war. The twentieth-century diaries of Anne Frank and Zlata Filipović describe what war does to children. The girls wrote about terror, hunger, and death. Zlata cried out DESPAIR !!! MISERY!!! FEAR!!! That’s my life. Zlata described herself as an innocent schoolgirl who was a child without a childhood.¹⁶

To be sure, enslaved nineteenth-century children and youth did not live with the actual bombardment of war or fear of going to a concentration camp, but their experiences with separations, terror, misery, and despair reduced them to children without childhoods. Although this state-of-war atmosphere was pervasive, it was more evident in some facets of the children’s lives than in others.

ABBREVIATIONS

REPOSITORIES

PERIODICALS

Stolen

Childhood

1

In the Beginning

THE TRANSATLANTIC TRADE IN

CHILDREN OF AFRICAN DESCENT

Charlotte one of my fellow prisoners …

did comfort me when I was torn

from my dear native land …

Sarah Margru [Kinson]

Your image has been always riveted in my heart, from which neither time nor fortune have been able to remove it; so that, while the thought of your sufferings have damped my prosperity, they have mingled with adversity and increased its bitterness, wrote Olaudah Equiano, also known as Gustavus Vassa, as he reflected upon the fate of his beloved sister. In 1756, a woman and two men raided Isseke, the children’s village in present-day Nigeria, while the adults were working in a common field nearly an hour away by foot. The raiders took the girl and her eleven-year-old brother, Olaudah, whose name means the fortunate one. The children, descendants of a slaveholding Ibo chief, were aware of a previous battle between the Ibos and their enemy. The warfare resulted in the victors taking prisoners who were either sold away or kept within the community. Fighting among different ethnic and language groups was not unusual in this part of West Africa, and it probably intensified with increased demands for black laborers by whites in the Americas.¹

Olaudah Equiano’s lengthy The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano: Written by Himself, which was wildly popular during his lifetime, may be a window into the lives of African boys and girls who experienced an abduction, sale, and removal from Africa. It is possible that Equiano’s graphic description of the Middle Passage garnered support for the British movement to abolish the slave trade, which coincides with the 1789 publication of his work. Doubts about the authenticity of The Interesting Narrative were raised soon after it was published, and questions about where Equiano was born linger—it may have been West Africa, the Danish West Indies, or South Carolina. Vincent Carretta, author of Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man, claims that "the available evidence suggests that the author of The Interesting Narrative may have invented rather than reclaimed an African identity." Baptismal and naval records place Equiano’s birth in South Carolina. A thorough interrogation of The Interesting Narrative leads Alexander X. Byrd to posit that Equiano’s use of Eboe as a geopolitical concept, cultural practice, or ethnic link to Africa is problematic. Byrd writes that Equiano was remarkably adept at putting himself in the mind of a boy from the Biafran interior.²

Questions remain about The Interesting Narrative. Is it an unreliable autobiography? Or is it a well-crafted novel? If Africa is the author’s birthplace, his claims about his birth, early childhood, abduction and his experience of the Middle Passage are his own. If he was not born in Africa, Equiano created a masterful composite of experiences recounted by others. In either case, the details in The Interesting Narrative, regardless of whether it was produced by a South Carolinian, Gustavus Vassa, or an African, Olaudah Equiano, do not disagree with details from other narratives that describe abductions, sales, and forced migrations from Africa to the New World, and it is useful in that regard.

This chapter seeks to reconstruct the experiences of girls and boys among the multitude of Africans who were abducted, sold, transported across the Atlantic, and enslaved in North America. Children, a significant entity in the transatlantic trade, were easier to seize, more malleable, and required less space aboard ships than adults. These features made youngsters attractive to slavers and serve as the basis for questions about the experiences of the most vulnerable of Africans in the trade. How did boys and girls respond to abductors who spirited them away from their families, friends, and communities? Although children were more tractable than adults, did that characteristic merit differences in their treatment once they were aboard the slavers? Were children, like adults, vulnerable to illness and death in the Middle Passage? What were the psychological costs of seeing shipmates sicken and die? In what ways did children differ from adults who revolted against their oppressors while on the high seas? Ultimately, answering these questions will provide a more nuanced view of the transatlantic trade and the girls and boys who were affected by it.³

The presence of children in the commercialization of human life is noted in official records, ship manifests, and logs as well as journals kept by medical doctors and slavers. Historian Paul Lovejoy estimates that girls and boys constituted over 12 percent of the Africans transported to the Americas during the period 1663 to 1700. Their number increased significantly in the period 1701 to 1809, when the proportion of children reached nearly 23 percent. In her study of children in the British trade in Africans, Audra A. Diptee affirms that from 1786 to 1792, 27 percent of the Africans transported from West Central Africa were children. In her overview of the Atlantic slave trade, Lisa A. Lindsay estimates that 28 percent were children. These percentages are applicable to the participation of England and the United States in the slave trade prior to 1807 and 1808, when they ended the overseas trade. During the second quarter of the nineteenth century, more than 60 percent of the Africans transported to the New World were boys and girls.⁴

On occasion, European slavers sought children specifically, as was the case in 1746, when William Ellery, owner of the Anstis, told Captain Pollipus Hammond, if you have good trade for the Negroes … purchase forty or fifty Negroes. get most of them mere Boys and Girls, some Men, let them be Young, No very small Children. Nearly twenty years later, entrepreneurs John Watts and Gedney Clarke discussed sending a ship to Africa to procure laborers for sale in New York. For this market, wrote Watts, the slaves must be young the younger the better if not quite Children, those advanced in years will never do. In general, the most marketable age was between ten and twenty-four years old.⁵

Mere Boys and Girls along with men and women were transported across the Atlantic together, but their accommodations varied according to age and gender. Young boys and girls often walked about the decks unfettered, while men were confined to the ship’s holds and women traveled on the quarter decks. Age, gender, physical conditions, and life experiences tempered Africans’ responses to being ensnared in the international trade, which began with their abduction and a trek to the coast, where they were sold before they were put on board slavers that would carry them across the Atlantic. Afterward, they were enslaved and challenged to adjust to a new form of bondage in America. No doubt children understood some portion of what was happening to them, but they, like the adults, had no way of knowing what the future held.⁶

Researchers seeking narratives from youthful Middle Passage survivors are certain to encounter obstacles. First, the extant records are biased in favor of males, who outnumbered the females. Second, males were more likely to gain literacy and publish their narratives. Furthermore, almost all enslaved youngsters lived under extremely harsh conditions without opportunities to record and preserve an account of events in their daily lives as they occurred. As a result, the extant records were created later, when the survivors were no longer children. Because of this, critics are likely to charge that such recollections are not representative, that they have been distorted by the subjects’ age, or that the accounts, especially if written by an amanuensis, are reflections of pro-abolitionist political agendas.⁷

An exception to traditional autobiographies that illuminate the experiences of youthful Middle Passage survivors is a small cache of letters written in 1774 by Little Ephraim Robin John and Ancona Robin Robin John. Their specific ages are never mentioned, but the data surrounding important events in their lives suggest that they were not mature adults when they were enslaved. It is well documented that Little Ephraim and Ancona Robin, who were not slave born and were not enslaved as a result of war, were abducted in 1767, sold in the Americas, and returned to their home in Old Calabar by 1774. The Robin John family elders, influential slave traders in the Bight of Biafra, had arranged for Little Ephraim and Ancona Robin to study in England. This was not an unusual decision among elite Africans, for it served to prepare their offspring, male and female, for future negotiations with Europeans. In the case of the Robin Johns, the plan went awry as intense rivalry between African traders and European slavers resulted in violence known as the Massacre at Old Calabar, which had consequences for the two youngsters.⁸

Prior to the actual fighting, Amboe, an older brother of Little Ephraim and Ancona Robin, boarded the British slaver Duke of York with his siblings, ostensibly to assist in mediating the dispute among the traders. Once Amboe realized the danger they faced, he fought with the captain and first mate to free himself and his brothers. According to Little Ephraim and Ancona Robin, the Captain Stroke him on the head while others behind him … were cutting him on [the] head and neck till he were spent & all must [almost] Killed. The bloodletting that followed resulted in the deaths of 300 Africans. Afterward, Captain James Bivins agreed to accept another man in exchange for Amboe, whom he handed over to his rivals. As Amboe’s younger brothers watched in horrible disbelief, their Enemies … cut off his head. After these events, the Robin Johns were not taken to London to pursue their studies. Instead, the captain put them in irons, transported them across the Atlantic Ocean, and sold them into slavery.⁹

The Robin Johns, who remained together throughout their seven-year ordeal, wrote about their experiences as they occurred or within a relatively short of period of time afterward. Their correspondence is most relevant for investigating the mechanics of the transatlantic trade and how the two young Africans freed themselves and returned home by way of England in less than a decade. Their oral and written English-language skills, acquaintances with European traders, and tenacity weighed heavily in their success. It also appears that the Little Johns were familiar with Somerset v. Stewart (1772), a case involving Virginia-born James Somerset, whose owner Charles Stewart, a Boston customs officer, had carried him to England in 1769. Two years later, Somerset ran away. When Somerset was found, Stewart planned to send him to Jamaica, where he would be sold. British abolitionists including Granville Sharp sympathized with Somerset and assisted in filing a writ of habeas corpus. Lord William Mansfield, chief justice of the Court of King’s Bench, heard Somerset’s case and rendered a narrow opinion that focused on questions about removing a slave from England by force.¹⁰

In all probability, British abolitionists were aware of the Little Johns’ plight and encouraged them to seek redress through the court. Whatever the case, Little Ephraim wrote directly to Lord Mansfield about their enslavement and eventually received a favorable hearing in a British court.¹¹

Unlike the Robin Johns’ letters, which focus specifically on their memory of the 1767 massacre, their enslavement in the Americas, and their quest for freedom, the narratives of other Middle Passage survivors mention their peers and some facet of an idyllic childhood before the raids resulting in their enslavement in the Americas. For example, a brief memoir by the African-born Florence Hall recounts playing in an open field with peers when raiders abducted her along with a number of her playmates. Similarly, the young boy Ottobah Cugoano was playing in a field with eighteen or twenty children when he was snatched away from [his] native country. Boyrereau Brinch similarly wrote about a carefree childhood characterized by his family’s blessings and a heart lighter than a feather. Brinch wrote that as he and his peers prepared for a frolic in a river, they could anticipate no greater pleasure, and knew no care. Their mirth came to an end when "waylayed by thirty or forty more of the … pale race of white Vultures," who seized eleven of the fourteen children.¹²

The abductions of Hall, Cugoano, Brinch, and their friends did not differ dramatically from what Olaudah Equiano and his sister experienced. But many children lived under less than ideal conditions before they were kidnapped and transported to the Americas. Many girls and boys were already enslaved in Africa as a result of warfare that had little or nothing to do with the transatlantic slave trade.¹³

Several autobiographies written by Middle Passage survivors indicate that youngsters had a working knowledge of potential dangers from raiders. For example, the Guinea-born Venture Smith vividly recalled the invasion of his village at the hands of hostile men. He estimated that he was only six years old, which would make the year 1729. Smith suggested that the intruders were instigated by some white nation.Whether motivated by Europeans or by their own initiatives, the raiders greeted the child with a violent blow on the head with the fore part of a gun, and at the same time a grasp around the neck. Afterward, Smith watched as the men closely interrogated his father before they cut and pounded on his body with great inhumanity. Smith wrote, I saw him while he was thus tortured to death. Witnessing such a tragedy was devastating and would have left a permanent imprint.¹⁴

The six-year-old boy could do nothing to save his father or his people from annihilation by the large and continuously moving army of slave raiders. As it entered one village after another, the army laid siege and immediately took men, women, children, flocks, and all their valuable effects … then went on to the next. Smith’s family had been forewarned, but it was too weak to withstand the assault. Their vulnerability was not unlike that of other narrators, including Hall and Equiano, who describe their hateful abductions. Cries and screams were raised, Hall recalled. Their protests, if heard, she added, were unattended. Neither Equiano nor his sister cried out: there was no time. Besides, the kidnappers stopped, or bound, their mouths to silence any protests.¹⁵

The knowledge that raiders would and did overrun villages and take prisoners had prompted the adults of Isseke to prepare themselves against invasions. According to Equiano, when the adults went out to work, they carried fire-arms, bows and arrows, broad two-edged swords and javelins along for protection. All [were] taught the use of these weapons; even our women are warriors, wrote Equiano, and march boldly out to fight along with the men.¹⁶

The warriors were of no help to Olaudah or his sister, and the children were catapulted into an unimaginable destiny. Their grief was overpowering, and their only relief was falling asleep in each other’s arms. After more than a day’s journey, the raiders separated the girl from her brother. The children’s pleas to remain together fell upon deaf ears. Afterward, Equiano refused to eat and cried and grieved continually about the status of his sister.¹⁷

There is no extant account of how the Equiano girl, whose name and age remain unknown, responded to the shock of abduction and detachment from her brother and other loved ones. One cannot assume that her gender mitigated her condition. However, it is reasonable to posit that she, Olaudah’s dear partner in all of his childish sports and the sharer of [his] joys and sorrows, displayed emotions much like those of her brother, who declared, I was quite oppressed and weighed down by grief after my mother and friends; and my love of liberty, ever great, was strengthened by the mortifying circumstances of not daring to eat with the freeborn children, although I was mostly their companion. The grief he felt over separation from his immediate family and birthplace was exacerbated by his loss of freedom and the humiliation associated with his newly imposed lower-class status.¹⁸

During the course of separation from his family, Olaudah Equiano met several older West African women who comforted him. One was a wife of an African chieftain who had once owned him. In fact, Equiano claimed, the kind woman was something like [his] mother. It is possible that the young Equiano girl also encountered circumstances like those her sibling experienced that may have ameliorated her condition.¹⁹

At length, perhaps after several months and as many owners, Olaudah and his sister were reunited. This interval indicates that the traders remained in the vicinity over a period of time as they sought more Africans to fill the holds of their ships. The children’s reunion was memorable. As soon as she saw me, he wrote, she gave a loud shriek, and ran into my arms. Neither child could speak. They simply clung to each other in mutual embraces and wept. The trader indulged them. The joy of being together again obliterated what Olaudah Equiano termed their misfortunes, albeit temporarily.²⁰

Neither Olaudah nor his sister realized how quickly the modicum of happiness would turn to sadness. When traders snatched her away for the last time, his anxiety intensified as he worried after her fate. He feared that his sister’s sufferings would be greater than his own. Perhaps his anxiety was grounded in gender conventions suggesting that she, a weak female, could not fend for herself or shield herself from harm and needed him, a stronger male, to protect her from abuses. He could not be with her to alleviate them. It would have been an esteemed pleasure, Equiano wrote, to encounter every misery for [her] and to procure [her] freedom by the sacrifice of my own.²¹

Olaudah, like his sister, had no choice in the matter. She may have been subjected to what he described as the violence of the African trader, the pestilential stench of a Guinea ship, the seasoning in the European colonies, or the lash and lust of a brutal and unrelenting overseer. What happened to the girl remains unknown. Perhaps she suffered a fate similar to that of other girls who were abducted and integrated into domestic slavery elsewhere in Africa. It is also possible that she was sold to Europeans and transported to a life of bondage in the Americas.²²

The autobiographies of James Albert Gronniosaw and Ottobah Cugoano include discussion of subjects similar to those in Equiano’s narrative. As a young boy Gronniosaw fell into the hands of traders and experienced what he described as a very unhappy and discontented journey from his village to the seacoast. The sadness and disappointment associated with being kidnapped became more poignant for Cugoano as he reached the seashore and saw many of his countrymen chained two and two, handcuffed, and some with their hands tied behind their backs. He empathized with them and understood their misery as he cried bitterly and in vain.²³

Gronniosaw, Cugoano, and other African girls and boys faced the same adversities as the adults who were propelled into the transatlantic trade. As commodities for exchange, they were often thrown together during negotiations. For example, in March 1750, slaver John Newton described a routine transaction when a Mr. Tucker came on board with 4 slaves, 2 men, 1 woman girl, and 1 woman with a small child. Several days later, Newton exchanged No. 60, 61; 2 small boys (of 3 ft 4 in) for a girl (4 foot 3 in) and No. 80, a small boy (3 ft 8 inches) for a woman. These exchanges suggest that small children had little value and that a female, whether a girl or a woman, was worth more than young boys. At other times, children were the chattel of choice regardless of gender. The October 22, 1717, minutes of the South Sea Company claimed that it was young Africans who sold the best on the Windward Coast, a reference to a group of islands in the Caribbean Sea that included St. Lucia and Grenada. The potential purchasers, according to the minutes, were poor and could not afford the price of adults.²⁴

Cost efficiency was paramount to the Africans and Europeans who bartered human chattel for consumable goods. As youngsters Little Ephraim and Ancona Robin John probably knew that Africans had developed a fondness for European textiles, iron, guns, and ammunition in addition to

common red, blue, and scarlet cloth, silver and brass rings, or bracelets, chains, little bells, false crystal, ordinary and course hats; Dutch pointed knives, pewter dishes, silk sashes, with false gold and silver fringes; blue serges; French paper, steels to strike fire … looking-glasses in gilt and plain frames, cloves, cinnamon, scissors, needles, course thread of sundry colors…. Lastly, a good quantity of Cognac brandy.

The demand for this or that item shifted dramatically, often to the consternation of merchants who brought thousands of items only to find no demand for them. Ezek Hopkins, captain of the Sally, a Rhode Island slaver, experienced changes in his customers’ tastes when he traded along the Guinea Coast in 1730–1731.²⁵

The vacillation in desire reflects the behavior of consumers who were responding to changing fashions of nonessential commodities rather than basic necessities. These desires set those buyers apart from their ordinary contemporaries, but their changed personal appearances did not actually improve the quality of their lives. The primary objective of such frivolous consumers was to serve their own interests, and they paid for purchases with textiles, gold dust, hides, beeswax, elephant teeth, feathers, and human beings. According to the log and account book of the New England slaver Greyhound, several children were traded for rum and tobacco. Venture Smith, who came of age in New England, claimed that Robertson Mumford, a crew member on a Rhode Island slaver, carried him aboard the ship after exchanging him for four gallons of rum and a piece of calico. James Albert Gronniosaw, also a child when taken from Africa, declared that he was sold for two yards of check [fabric]. The captain of the Sally bartered with 55 galons of Rum and 1 gun for a garle Slave on January 9, 1765.²⁶

The trade in human beings for goods was possible because of self-interest and greed within the context of internal conflicts among different ethnic groups of Africans. It is against this background that adults and children were victimized by victors who had no compunction about ridding themselves of surplus slaves—spoils of war—seemingly to fill an insatiable desire for foreign goods. Equally arresting is the knowledge that when children were used as a medium of exchange, it required more girls or boys than adults to purchase the same quantity of desired goods.²⁷

As demands for more black laborers increased across the centuries, European traders and African leaders supplied the workers through an organized business system. Fortified castles were built with the permission of African rulers along the seashore at Christianburg, Cape Coast, Goree, Whydah, and Bissau that served as sites for negotiations between traders, black and white. The castles were also holding places, or barracoons, where Africans remained until an oceangoing vessel that had been sailing along the coast arrived or was ready to transport them to the Americas.²⁸

Once the international trade reached this level of sophistication, the method of filling demands changed. Europeans exploited divisions among Africans based on class and culture for their own purposes. At the same time, African leaders realized the profit-making potential in kidnapping men, women, or children by continuing to fight old enemies or starting wars with new ones. In their discussion of slave-trading and warfare in West Africa, historians Michael L. Conniff and Thomas J. Davis write that civil wars and the related breakdown of authority allowed soldier-slavers to become a serious problem. The Imbangala mercenaries pillaged many regions of Angola in the seventeenth century, unimpeded by the states weakened by war. Endemic warfare in the Kingdom of Kongo during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries resulted in bandits terrorizing villages and wreaking havoc. Similar conditions existed in the kingdom of Benin during the eighteenth century. Ultimately, the disorder and warfare meant the loss of freedom for many girls, boys, women, and men who were enslaved elsewhere in Africa or in the Americas.²⁹

The resulting losses for the Africans must be attributed to the Africans and Europeans who were responsible for their suffering. We cannot take the simple attitude, asserts historian Walter Rodney, that the whites were the villains and the blacks were the victims. The nature of the participation of whites and blacks differed, yet it was complementary. With the exception of Portuguese penetration in Angola, Europeans did not go deep into the interior of Africa to seize men, women, boys, and girls. The pithy remark of Florence Hall that Enemies of our Country seized and sold us to the white people, for the love of drink, and from the quarrels of their chiefs suggests that the enslaved Eboe girl had grown to understand the intricate dimensions of the international trade in African children and adults.³⁰

To be sure, there were variations from the reasons Hall mentions. Some were enslaved because of abuse of power in the hands of priests, chiefs, or judges. John Barbot, agent-general for the English Royal Company of Africa in the 1670s, said, The kings are so absolute, that upon any slight pretense of offence committed by their subjects, they order them to be sold for slaves without regard to rank, or possession. The misuse of power figures importantly in the explanation of why a fifteen-year-old girl was among the Africans on the brig Ruby of Bristol. Nicknamed Eve because she was the first woman aboard the slaver, the teenager conveyed a sad tale, perhaps through an interpreter, to the ship’s doctor, James Arnold, about a goat that had appeared mysteriously in her father’s garden. One of the village’s great men, whom she believed had it placed there, accused her father of theft. As restitution, the father had to give up one of his three daughters, and the headman selected Eve, whom he sold to overseas traders.³¹

One is left to ask what precipitated the subsequent enslavement of Eve’s eight-year-old sister, whom traders brought aboard the Ruby three months after Eve’s arrival. It was not unusual for slavers to remain on the coast several months or longer while the captain continued trading until he acquired the desired number of Africans; that is why the two girls boarded the Ruby at different times. Perhaps the meeting of the sisters was similar to the reunion between Olaudah Equiano and his sister. It is impossible to tell how long they remained together. If both girls survived the voyage, it is likely that they disembarked and were sold into the same community. If this occurred, maintaining a familial relationship would have been possible, and this did happen on sometimes. Otherwise, Eve and her sister, like millions of other Africans of both genders and all ages, would endure further separation from real and fictive kin in Africa and the Americas.³²

The effects of the transatlantic trade on Africa demographically and economically remain topics of serious debate, but no one would dispute the fact that the commerce robbed Africa of the energy and creativity of millions of girls and boys and women and men. And it is evident that this vile international commerce changed the lives of both the youngsters who remained in Africa and those who were taken away. The loss of a great number of men among people who practiced polygyny was offset by continued reproduction, so women were able to carry on in their positions as caregivers with the assistance of other women, but the quality and quantity of time they spent with their offspring changed. The demographics and quality of life of those who remained in Africa are of importance. In regions where most of the Africans who were exported were males between twelve and sixty years of age, a disproportionate amount of work shifted to women. Without able-bodied men to fell trees and clear fields for cultivation, the women’s workloads increased as their roles expanded.³³

In the absence of the men who had been taken, women spent more time clearing fields and less time cultivating. This resulted in less agricultural produce for subsistence and as marketable surplus commodities. Similarly, fewer men were available to hunt, fish, and raise livestock. As a result, diets contained fewer sources of protein unless those who were left behind had access to alternative food sources to sustain themselves.³⁴

What happened to the Africans left behind in their homelands is as important as what lay ahead for those who reached the seacoast and were imprisoned while awaiting final processing before the Middle Passage. Traders separated the able-bodied from those who were less able by examining naked males and females, even to the smallest member … without the least distinction or modesty. They also branded able-bodied Africans with the name or symbol of the trading company. William Bosman, chief factor of the Dutch West India Company at Elmina, a port along the coast of Ghana, West Africa, and the author of A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea, Divided into the Gold, the Slave, and the Ivory Coasts, etc (1701), claimed that branding seemed very barbarous but declared it was followed by meer necessity. This necessity prevented African traders from exchanging hearty males or females in place of those who were deemed unfit. Bosman asserts that whites took all possible care not to burn the slaves too hard, especially the women, who are more tender than the men.³⁵

Bosman does not mention the branding of boys and girls, who would be more tender than the men and women because of their age. It is reasonable to think that girls and boys were also marked to distinguish the fit from the unfit and in an attempt to ferret out treachery. The pain caused by the sizzling hot iron subsided over time, but branding left an indelible imprint on the African’s body and was a visible reminder of the torture endured. And branding whether it was experienced or witnessed, also made an indelible imprint on the Africans’ psyche that observers could not see.

There was little attention given to the comfort of Africans during their voyage. Augustino recalled that the clothes of all the negroes going on board ship were stripped off … even to the last rag. Some captains provided cloth for the Africans to cover themselves and mats for them to lie upon; others did not. One former crew member wrote, The Hollanders and other Europeans take no such care in transporting their slaves to America, but ship them poor and faint, without any mats, or other necessaries.³⁶

Although it is impossible to determine the exact number of girls and boys who were shipped across the ocean, it is known that the numbers varied across time and region. The ages recorded by those who were responsible provide data for the best estimates of the size of the trade. Males estimated to be less than sixteen years of age were considered boys, while females under fifteen were considered girls. The line of demarcation between men and boys is not finite. In fact, another category, man boy, was sometimes used. Also, there were irregularities in reporting. Dr. James Houstoun, chief surgeon at Cape Coast Castle in 1722, noted that children under ten years old were occasionally listed in the company books as women.³⁷

The heights of males and females may have been better indicators of their status than estimates of their ages. In either case, boys and girls are generally smaller than men and women and more children could be transported than adults. The transporting of children was significant; a bill passed by the British Parliament entitled An Act to Regulate the Carrying of Slaves (1788) stated that if the cargo constituted more than two-fifths children measuring less than four feet four inches in height, every five such children were deemed equal to four adults.³⁸

The space allotments and designations on ships varied according to gender and size. Adult males had a space six feet long by sixteen inches wide and two feet seven inches high. Space for women was not as long, measuring five feet ten inches long by sixteen inches wide. Boys and girls received even less space. Young males were to fill no more than five feet by fourteen inches while small females had four feet six inches by twelve inches. These measurements appear to be standard, but exceptions existed. The Philadelphian William Chancellor, a surgeon aboard the sloop Wolf in 1750, claimed that the vessel, which sailed from New York, did not have a quarter deck or platform to accommodate the young Africans. Yet children of three and four years of age were taken aboard. Chancellor commented that of the 5 Ships 3 Snows 1 Bri[g]. & 3 Sloops at Cape Coast Castle none was so unfit for Slaves as the Wolf.³⁹

The children, wrote Chancellor, lie on Casks. One can imagine the containers used to transport tar, pitch, rum, or sugar shifting or rolling as the children, on their own, it seems sought a resting place. A tired or sleepy three- or four-year-old child would not understand the peril he or she faced among the casks. It is no wonder, Chancellor commented, that we loose them so fast.⁴⁰

Sometimes children made up the majority of Africans aboard a slaver. The Margarita, Maria, and Wanderer are significant for the number of young Africans they carried. The Margarita left Africa in 1734 with ninety-three Africans, sixty-two males and thirty-one females. Their ages ranged from ten to eighteen, and 87 percent were sixteen or younger. The largest cluster, twenty-two males and seventeen females, were twelve years old. The average age of the Africans was thirteen years and four months. The Maria sailed in 1790 with eight crew members and eighty Africans on board. Ninety percent of the Africans were