Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood: African American Children in the Antebellum North

By Crystal Lynn Webster

For all that is known about the depth and breadth of African American history, we still understand surprisingly little about the lives of African American children, particularly those affected by northern emancipation. But hidden in institutional records, school primers and penmanship books, biographical sketches, and unpublished documents is a rich archive that reveals the social and affective worlds of northern Black children. Drawing evidence from the urban centers of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, Crystal Webster's innovative research yields a powerful new history of African American childhood before the Civil War. Webster argues that young African Americans were frequently left outside the nineteenth century's emerging constructions of both race and childhood. They were marginalized in the development of schooling, ignored in debates over child labor, and presumed to lack the inherent innocence ascribed to white children. But Webster shows that Black children nevertheless carved out physical and social space for play, for learning, and for their own aspirations.

Reading her sources against the grain, Webster reveals a complex reality for antebellum Black children. Lacking societal status, they nevertheless found meaningful agency as historical actors, making the most of the limited freedoms and possibilities they enjoyed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Apr 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9781469663241

Crystal Lynn Webster

Crystal Lynn Webster is assistant professor of history at the University of British Columbia.

Book preview

Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood

THE JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN SERIES IN AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY AND CULTURE

Waldo E. Martin Jr. and Patricia Sullivan, editors

Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood

African American Children in the Antebellum North

Crystal Lynn Webster

The University of North Carolina Press  CHAPEL HILL

This book was published with the assistance of the Authors Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

© 2021 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Set in Merope Basic by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Names: Webster, Crystal Lynn, author.

Title: Beyond the boundaries of childhood : African American children in the antebellum North / Crystal Lynn Webster.

Other titles: John Hope Franklin series in African American history and culture.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press,

[2021]

| Series: The John Hope Franklin series in African American history and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020048504 | ISBN 9781469663227 (cloth) | ISBN 9781469663234 (paperback) | ISBN 9781469663241 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: African American children—Social conditions—19th century. | African American youth—Social conditions—19th century.

Classification: LCC E185.86 .W4353 2021 | DDC 305.23089/96073—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020048504

Cover illustrations: Top, B. R. Evans, East side of Thirteenth above Callowhill. Occupied in 1844 by Colored Orphan Asylum (reproduced with permission from the Library Company of Philadelphia); bottom, sketchbook drawing of children playing blindman’s bluff, Morris family papers

[3424],

Historical Society of Pennsylvania (reproduced with permission from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania).

Chapter 5 was previously published in a different form as In Pursuit of Autonomous Womanhood: Nineteenth-Century Black Motherhood in the U.S. North, Slavery & Abolition 38, no. 2 (2017): 425–40 (https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2017.1317070).

To my children, Zora and Mercer, and to all Black children who continue to shape the boundaries of childhood

Contents

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

The Intersections of Race and Age

Toward a New Approach to Black Childhood

CHAPTER ONE

Fugitive Play

The Imaginative World of Northern Black Childhood

CHAPTER TWO

Inside the Walls of Childhood

Antebellum Institutions for Black Children

CHAPTER THREE

At Work

From Enslavement to Indentured Servitude

CHAPTER FOUR

In School

The Journey to the Classroom and Equal Education

CHAPTER FIVE

The World Their Parents Made

Activism and Discourse of Black Parents and Mothers

EPILOGUE

From Stephen Ricks to Tamir Rice

Old and New Boundaries of Childhood

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures

1.1  Eva St. Claire and Topsy paper dolls   21

1.2  Colored Orphan Asylum girls’ playground   30

1.3  Colored Orphan Asylum playroom   31

1.4  Morris family sketch of playing children   33

1.5  Morris family sketch of children playing blindman’s bluff   34

2.1  Philadelphia Colored Orphan Home   37

2.2  Philadelphia House of Refuge   57

2.3  Rioters burning and sacking the Colored Orphan Asylum   62

4.1  Writing sample from the Pennsylvania Abolition Society   96

Acknowledgments

This book is the product of an extensive network of colleagues, family, friends, and community. But it begins, quite predictably, with children. When I was a teacher in Clarksdale, Mississippi, my fourth grade students—all Black—impacted me in profound ways. Their playfulness, anger, joy, sadness, and struggles were overwhelming. Despite my best efforts, I believed I could not be the teacher they needed. I left them to pursue a PhD in African American studies, but they have stayed with me in my intellectual pursuits. Even before I became a mother, my students inspired this project and changed the way I see the world and the historical archive of Black childhood.

I am grateful to have parents and family who instilled within me a love of learning. My father, Art Sheffield, has twenty siblings, most of whom attended at least college. The Sheffield family history and educational background motivate me. So, too, do the Walkers. Witnessing my mother, Martha, earn her doctorate was an inspiration. This book would not have been possible without my parents’ assistance with childcare. My sister, Angela, was a model student and an intellectual. I am grateful to have been raised in a home where issues of race, history, and politics were constantly discussed.

My journey into African American studies began during my undergraduate career at Oberlin College and was cultivated by passionate faculty, including James Millette, Gordon Gill, Pam Brooks, Darko Opoku, Meredith Gadsby, and Caroline Jackson-Smith. I am forever grateful to these scholars who allowed me to learn about myself and the field, and especially to Caroline Jackson-Smith, who told me I would one day be a professor—a career I had not even dreamed possible.

My formalized research for this book began during my doctoral studies at the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. I first read the most foundational texts for this project through Britt Rusert’s seminar. The course and conversations with Britt Rusert were essential to the formulation of ideas for this book. She introduced me to Robin Bernstein’s work, which is incredibly foundational to my own. Robin Bernstein has continued to offer enthusiastic support of this project. I also worked through parts of the research with esteemed scholars who were in the department and at the university, including Karen Y. Morrison, John Bracey, Amilcar Shabazz, and Ernie Allen, as well as my stellar dissertation committee members, Manisha Sinha, Barbara Krauthamer, Laura Lovett, and James Smethurst. Manisha Sinha especially encouraged me at the origins of the project and told me it was a great idea, and continues to motivate me to be a diligent scholar. My fellow graduate students and cohort members, including Carlyn Ferrari, Nneka Dennie, Jacinta Saffold, Peter Blackmer, Bob Williams, and Julia Bernier, have played important roles in the cultivation of my work. Other graduate students and UMass graduates also supported this work, including Chris Tinson, Ousmane Power-Greene, Gina Occasion, Anna-Claire Simpson, and Joy Hayward-Jansen. I owe a special extension of gratitude to Crystal Donkor and Mike Jirik, whose continual conversations, writing exchanges, and encouragement have been indispensable.

Three conferences were incredibly influential during my graduate studies. I attended the American Antiquarian Society summer seminar, Reading Children. I was privileged then to meet many of the leading scholars in the field, some of whom I have established friendly collegial relationships with, including Anna Mae Duane, Brigitte Fielder, Monica Mercado, and Karen Sanchez-Eppler. I also had the opportunity to participate in the Mothering Slaves Conference in Reading, UK. Here I learned from and conversed with numerous scholars, including Stephanie Jones-Rogers, Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, Emily West, Natasha Lightfoot, and Diana Paton. At the Global Black Girlhood Conference, my project was greatly influenced by scholars and presenters I met there and after, including Tammy Owens, Tara Bynum, and Lindsey Jones. I owe a debt of gratitude to the organizers, LaKisha Simmons and Corinne Field, who have both encouraged and advised me during this process. Other inspirational scholars who have supported my research include Kabria Baumgartner, Nazera Wright, Daina Ramey Berry, and Hilary Green.

My professional networks and research productivity increased dramatically during a yearlong fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia. For that opportunity, I owe great appreciation to Erica Armstrong Dunbar, whose encouragement and support allowed me to complete the fellowship with a young child at home and a new baby on the way. While at the Library Company, I met numerous scholars with whom I shared ideas and participated in generative conversations, including Nicole Dressler, Cassandra Berman, and Rashauna Johnson.

I have worked with numerous librarians and archivists whose assistance was essential to the research for this book. Especially important have been those at the American Antiquarian Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Massachusetts Historical Society, especially Krystal Appiah and Laura Wasowicz. In addition to the support I have received from archives, I am grateful for the research support I received from the University of Texas, San Antonio, and faculty including Catherine Clinton, as well as Joycelyn Moody and Jerry Gonzalez, who both read parts of the manuscript. Other readers include Elena Abbott and the participants of the McNeil Center Brownbag Symposium.

Finally, my close family—Zora, Mercer, and Kwame. You inspire me in so many ways. Kwame, you are my partner on an emotional, spiritual, and intellectual level. Our long discussions and debates fuel my research and writing. Zora and Mercer, you are the children I imagine when I write. When I started the project you were babies, and now, as I finish, you are the ages of many of the children in the book. I am lucky to be your mother and have the great pleasure to write about children while I have two of my own.

Stephen to Mary.

Mary, once I feared to go

From a world of care and woe;

But thou taught me how to die—

How to fix my hopes on high;

Bade my childish fears depart,

And revived my trembling heart;

Told me in a heavenly land,

With a chosen seraph band,

I should join in singing praise,

And my feeble anthems raise.

Yes! thou taught a little child,

With affection meek and mild,

That his home was far above,

In a land of peace and love;

Told me Jesus sweetly smiled

On a humble, sable child.

Oh then, dearest Mary, still

With thy kind, persuasive skill,

Lead a little orphan band

To this bright, celestial land,

Where the colored people share

In redeeming mercy fair.

In that holy, heavenly spot,

Jesus says, "Forbid them not;

Suffer them to come to me,

They shall of my goodness see."

And when Mary’s glass is run,

When her work on earth is done,

Here a little ransomed band

Shall before her joyful stand,

Welcome to a land of love,

To a shelter far above,

Where no little orphan’s tear

Shall distress a heart sincere;

Where no parting funeral knell

Shall a long, sad farewell tell.

Oh then, dearest Mary, stay—

Teach the orphans how to pray;

Lead them all to Jesus fair,

Make them thy peculiar care—

Bid their infant hearts arise,

Lead them to the blissful skies.

—Found in Mary Walton’s work-box, after the decease of Stephen Ricks, who died at the Shelter for Colored Orphans, in the 2nd month, 1832.

Published in the Slave’s Friend, no. 10

Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood

INTRODUCTION

The Intersections of Race and Age

Toward a New Approach to Black Childhood

Bein alive and bein a woman and bein colored is a metaphysical dilemma I haven’t conquered yet.

—NTOZAKE SHANGE, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf, 1975

On the surface, the papers of the Morris family appear interesting yet ordinary—a collection of financial documents, correspondence, and diaries documenting the lives of an elite white Philadelphian family from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Yet concealed among the papers is a sketchbook. Presumably completed by one of the children in the middle of the nineteenth century, it offers rich and rare depictions of children at play. A drawing of a pastoral scene shows children in various poses—one in a tree, one on another child’s shoulders, one playing with toys, and one running with animals (see figure 1.4). Another shows a parade of children in a horse-drawn carriage. Within the elaborate drawings of children at play, all drawn with faces left undifferentiated from the neutral blankness of the off-white page, one image stands out: a depiction of a young girl, simply titled Rachel.¹ Unlike the other children, Rachel’s brown face is colored with soft pencil strokes (see figure 1.5). In the image, her curly hair frames her profile, she wears an apron, and one of the children tugs on her dress as they play blindman’s buff.²

Rachel is almost imperceptible in the Morris Family Papers. Her placement is uncatalogued and undefined. She does not seem to appear anywhere else in the forty-one boxes of family records housed at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. In one sense, she exists only as a child’s drawing, forever confined to the realm of childhood. Yet, insofar as her appearance is unexpected—she is not where she’s supposed to be—she also reveals so much about northern African American childhood. This archive, with its rare possession of children’s materials, has even less of African American children, particularly those who lived in the nineteenth-century northern United States. Children like Rachel operated between and around historical, conceptual, geographic, and racialized boundaries of childhood and are therefore assumed to have disappeared from the historical record. However, as Hannah Morris’s sketch illustrates, African Americans did have childhoods—and the existence of figurative and actual Black children challenges the ways that we conceptualize childhood, race, and the archive.

This book tells the story of African Americans like Rachel who have eluded historical and historiographical recognition as Black children of the antebellum North, and it does so from a child-centered perspective. Rather than a legal history of northern emancipation, it is a social history which focuses on Black children’s lives in the transition from slavery to freedom. Through the process of emancipation in the North, which freed most African Americans after they were indentured and reached adulthood, Black children were subjected to new forms of unfreedom particular to their race, age, and laboring status.³ As a result, they were suspended between freedom and slavery, and between childhood and adulthood. Black children’s responses to these changing conditions tell us much about the history of nineteenth century reform movements, childhood, and African Americans.

Understanding the lives of northern Black children, I argue, contributes two major interventions to nineteenth century American history. The first is that control of northern Black children, particularly in relation to their labor, was central to activist movements in the antebellum North. Emancipation was bittersweet, and the indenture of Black children’s labor suppressed Black advancement in the postemancipation North. Reformers, abolitionists, educational activists, and Black parents alike were constantly concerned with the treatment of Black children following gradual emancipation. White society restricted northern Black children to social states of dependency by binding their labor for a period of time through indentured servitude, and institutionalized childhood in racialized ways. Reformers excluded Black children from—and sometimes confined them within—physical sites of childhood including schools, orphanages, and reformatories. Abolitionists and antislavery activists centered Black child labor and education as central parts of the fight against slavery and for Black rights. This book reorients the history of the period by illustrating the ways in which conflict over the treatment and exploitation of Black children altered the course of these prominent nineteenth century movements.

This book’s second intervention is to show that Black children themselves acted in political ways through their play, labor, and schooling—influencing prevailing ideas of race, childhood, and freedom of the time. Through their negotiation of social and physical spaces surveilled by white reformers, and in their attempts to adhere to ideas of respectable childhood promoted by Black activists, they exposed abuse, discrimination, and neglect particular to their lives. In so doing, Black children participated in the political process of freedom-making. This book looks not to the future potential of Black children who might who grow up to be significant influences on society, but rather to their childhood as an important site of interrogation which illuminates their vastly underappreciated impact on the postemancipation landscape of the North.

This is a story of children’s play, schooling, and activism, but it is also one of violence. Black children experienced the violence of confinement, separation, labor, abuse, and death. While all adults were once children, some of the children explored in this book never grew up. Their deaths were a part of the process by which the boundaries of childhood closed firmly around whiteness and left northern Black children vulnerable to increased risk of death due to conditions of labor, violence, and illness. As part of a broader suppression of Black freedom and humanity, they were denied a claim on the category of childhood—a claim that might have protected them. Nonetheless, the children in this study creatively and furtively moved within and around emerging boundaries of race and childhood by occupying institutional, cultural, and physical spaces reserved for children. In doing so, they both challenged the boundaries of childhood and created new ones that recognized the social and political value of the Black child.

The antebellum North, particularly the cities of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, is the ideal site to examine the evolution of childhood and its intersection with the exploitation of Black children’s freedom and labor. As racial resentment hardened into institutionalized white supremacy following emancipation in the region, Black children’s lives were shaped by many competing forces. Children in Philadelphia and New York were impacted by Quaker activism and humanitarian reform that led to the creation of orphanages and reformatories for Black children. Boston was a site of both abolitionist and educational activism. Whites indentured Black children in all three regions, but African Americans in New York carved out unparalleled levels of autonomy in this process. In each city, African Americans, especially women and mothers, resisted the exploitation of their children’s labor and education as well as the violence of separation and abuse. The rising activism of African American abolitionists and the Black community in the latter part of the antebellum era challenged the white, paternalistic motivations of reformers who were concerned with the welfare of Black children at the expense of Black autonomy.

Following gradual emancipation, northern society experimented with its treatment of the Black community through the bodies of Black children. The process of gradual emancipation laid the foundation for new forms of unfree, bound labor by contract. African American children were no longer enslaved, but they were indentured or apprenticed for an extended period, sometimes to their former enslavers. Their exploitation was linked to their institutionalization in orphanages, schools, and reformatories. In response, Black children’s lives and behavior became politically charged and strategically resilient. As physical and social spaces for white middle-class children’s play were created, Black children created new avenues of play and leisure as well. When Black children’s labor was exploited through indentured servitude, they contested this process by running away. And in their pursuits of schooling and admission to juvenile institutions, they actively challenged threats of violence in their journeys to and from—and within—the schoolroom. The actions of children, individually and collectively, as well as conceptualizations of childhood, played key roles in social and political movements that developed during this period, including educational equality, prison and labor reform, humanitarianism, and abolitionism.

Nineteenth century childhood was constituted by dominant society in ways that rendered Black childhood insignificant, irrelevant, or obsolete. When Black children embodied characteristics and features of childhood that challenged the racialization of American childhood, they challenged the very concept of childhood itself. Their actions troubled the stability of the category. They confronted constructions of childhood that made their claims to the identity of child precarious and consistently challenged by white society. Studies of how Black childhood was expressed—or excluded—in the nineteenth century therefore require research methodologies that make visible these fugitive forms of resistance at the intersections of age, race, and gender.⁴ Such methodologies illuminate the acutely subjugated position of Black children as well as their creative forms of resistance.

In my journey through the archive, I located African American children, a group that is extremely underrepresented in historical records, by reading closely for the experience of children yearning to be seen in unexpected places. Black children reveal themselves in the literary, cultural, and material worlds of the antebellum North. Seeing them requires an extensive and interdisciplinary approach to sources that is informed by research frameworks rooted in Black studies, material culture, performance studies, and Black feminist theory. In school and institutional records, teachers and reformers inserted meanings to the behavior and actions of African American children. I read these sources for insight into the daily, material lives of Black children. Their experiences were sometimes recorded in places seemingly distinct from the lives of Black children: the private correspondence and diary entries of white families distantly connected to the indenture or reform of northern Black children. And finally, I engage the rare but rich archives of material objects owned, curated for, and created by Black children, such as toys and books.

My definition of childhood is intentionally broad. The children in this study generally fit the terms of the era, with the age of twenty-one initiating legal entrance to adulthood (particularly for white males). I add specificity regarding age when it is documented. However, African Americans experienced vastly different childhoods than whites. Black girlhood was markedly distinct from Black boyhood. Enslaved southern childhood was defined on different legal terms than northern indentured servitude. And many of the subjects of this study did not know their ages. Some were represented using language that infantilized them; others were treated as adults. The very process of gradual emancipation extended childhood and dependency, in some cases to age twenty-eight. Thus, experiences of childhood were diverse even though children’s ages may have been the same. The impact of slavery, race, and gender on child-bodies requires an entirely new theoretical model that accounts for these variations and contradictions.

In this book, I introduce a theoretical model for understanding childhood that accounts for both the undefinable nature of Black childhood and my archival process: the metaphysics of childhood. Ntozake Shange wrote that Black women experience a metaphysical dilemma when attempting to embody dual identities of Blackness and womanhood.⁵ Similarly, Black children faced disbarment from a natural, biological, or universal experience of childhood. Conceived of metaphysically—somewhere between physical reality and the mind—childhood is both a state of being and a material site with racialized and gendered markers of physical development.

Conceptualizing childhood as a metaphysical space accounts for Black children’s racialization as well as for their own thoughts, behaviors, materiality, and actions as they moved in and out of physical sites of childhood—schools, orphanages, and reformatories—and perceived statuses and states of being as workers, dependents, deviants, and/or innocents. Some children were suspended between childhood and adulthood, yet outside of both. Society refused to see Black children fully as either children or adults.⁶ This metaphysical framework allows for an explanation of childhood beyond the physical space of the body—as even Black child-bodies were othered by whites who pathologized them as biologically and naturally prone to illness, crime, or labor.

The metaphysics of childhood embraces these contradictions and seemingly hidden archival representations. It is informed by work that exposes the silences in the archival records in respect to the Black experience, in particular Black feminist scholarship that accounts