A few months after the Civil War ended, one of the pre-eminent children’s magazines of the era, Our Young Folks, published a short story about a heroic young drummer boy named Robert. Captured at the Battle of Chancellorsville, Robert bravely stood up to the famed Confederate general Robert E. Lee, survived a serious illness while kept in the infamous Libby Prison, and became an inspiration to the older soldiers imprisoned with him. In addition to encouraging readers to be brave and patriotic, the story assured them of “the great importance of little things, —and little folks are of much greater importance than little things.” [Edmund Kirke, “The Boy of Chancellorsville,” Our Young Folks 1 (September 1865): 601.]
Although intended for a very different kind of audience, Michaël Roy’s welcome book on child abolitionists suggests the same thing: young northerners caught up in the anti-slavery movement were not simply sponges absorbing adult ideas and following adult leadership but were active participants articulating in their own ways their opposition to slavery and support for the enslaved. In “document[ing] the varied and sometimes unexpected ways in which children were involved in the abolition movement,” Roy explores the books and magazines they read, the juvenile antislavery societies they joined, the school lectures and essays they heard and wrote, the antislavery fairs they organized and attended, and the fundraising campaigns they assisted (5). Although limited—like most histories of children and youth—by a narrow range of available sources and a tenuous grip on what “child” meant in antebellum America, Young Abolitionists makes an original contribution to the histories of both childhood and abolitionism, particularly in Roy’s determined and largely successful efforts to integrate into the narrative “African American children, [who] no less than adults, were responsible for keeping the antislavery fire going” (7).
Roy identifies two important contexts for the emergence of young abolitionists. The first was the growing understanding of children as naturally good—or at least not inherently evil, as portrayed by John Locke in the late seventeenth century and Jean-Jacque Rousseau in the eighteenth. Adherents to this version of childhood could easily believe that children were “natural” abolitionists: their prejudices had not yet been acquired from the racist society in which they lived, and their innate sense of justice led them toward antislavery. The second was the temperance movement, which also attracted the participation of children; in both the temperance and antislavery movements, children became not only advocates but also symbols of the evils of drink and of slavery.
Although Roy draws effectively on several small manuscript collections, including compelling essays written by students at the New York African Free School, he relies mostly on books, pamphlets, tracts, textbooks, and other published documents. Aside from rare, anecdotal examples, it is difficult to identify actual readers or to know what they took away from their reading. This does not undermine Roy’s close and useful reading of the material, but it highlights a limitation of published materials in helping us understand the lived experiences of children. Roy continually stresses the agency of children choosing to participate in the movement. He admits that most children were initially introduced to antislavery through parents or teachers, but he maintains that they “soon came to develop their own understandings of abolition, deploying surprising degrees of agency in the process” (6). Yet evidence demonstrating that sort of self-determination and independent motivations is scarce. Roy acknowledges this tension and does more than most in separating children’s agency from adult influence, but it nevertheless embodies one of the most common challenges of researching the histories of children and youth.
The chapter on the ways in which abolitionists raised their children into the movement is the most successful in integrating encouragement and agency and in helping us better understand the motivations and points of view of actual children and youth. The greatest generation of abolitionists—Garrison, Douglass, and others—raised their children with purpose and care. Roy emphasizes especially the roles of mothers, who exposed them to activism and made abolitionism a central part of their “civic education” (159).
Despite the caveats mentioned above, Young Abolitionists succeeds in highlighting a dramatically understudied facet of both the history of childhood and the history of reform and abolitionism.
James Marten is Professor Emeritus of History at Marquette University and the author of many books, both on the Civil War era and the history of childhood.