Childhoods: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Children and Youth

Dangerous Childhoods in Antebellum U.S. Literature

Laura Soderberg

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781613768457
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Childhood as scholars often recognize it—innocent, vulnerable, and above all, precious—is anchored in the cultural imagination of the early nineteenth-century United States, when an attitude of child worship drove sentimental politics and literature. But, not all childhoods were defined by love, education, and nurture. Singled out by nineteenth-century legal and medical establishments, children already marginalized by slavery, ethnicity, and poverty were increasingly branded as incorrigible,  delinquent, and antisocial. Vicious Infants offers a counterhistory of literary childhood as both perceived social threat and site of resistance, revealing that many children were not only cut off from family and society, they were also preemptively excluded from the rewards of citizenship and adulthood. Turning to prison documents, medical journals, overlooked periodical fiction, and literary works from William Apess, Harriet Wilson, Herman Melville, Susan Paul, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Laura Soderberg recovers alternate narratives of childhood and provides an important window into the cultural links between race, reproduction, and childhood in the antebellum period.

Chapter 1

Bound Children

Sidestepping the Social Contract in Apprenticeship Literature

Cynthia Barns entered the public record in 1822, when she was seven years old. Described as the child of a dead father and a mother “who is poor and exposed to want and distress and has no one to take proper care of her,” Cynthia represented a problem to the town of Pomfret, Connecticut.1 She was understandably considered unable to find a profession on her own, and her mother was considered too poor to act as a guardian. While it was clear that someone had to take care of her, it was an open question as to who in the community would do so. Pomfret lacked the institutions—orphanages, children’s homes, or juvenile prisons—that would have stepped in had Cynthia lived in a bigger city or a later decade. Instead, the town deployed an earlier tool for managing unattached children, opting to indenture her to a Samuel Richmond and his wife. In exchange for the promise that Cynthia would serve them “faithfully and dutifully” until the age of eighteen and a one-time sum of twenty-five dollars, the document contracts the Richmonds to care for Cynthia’s needs in the present, by “furnish[ing] her in sickness and health with proper food, physic and clothing suitable for every day ware and suitably for Lord’s day with suitable Lodging and washing” and to train her for the future in “the business of housewifery & pinning & knitting & sewing.” As a precursor of the welfare state, indentures of this kind functioned as an explicit suturing of a subject into social structures from which they were otherwise excluded.

The resulting document looks strange from the perspective of contemporary divisions of public and private. Cynthia is held to be too young to enter into the market herself and so must be placed within a family, yet her physical labor is still presented as a marketable object that can be purchased for the cost of her care. Similarly, the wages that Cynthia receives come in the form of goods and services that are often seen as falling outside of the sphere of employment; she receives no money during her apprenticeship but does have a promise that her physical needs will be met. Cynthia Barns’s indenture comes close to a privatized system of welfare, but her status as both a laboring body available for contract and a subject in need of protection from the market creates a more fundamental complication to ideas of private and public. Indenture subsidizes her eventual entry into the workplace through a limited exposure to the same, projecting a future of work that is paid for by the same labor that the text excludes from the public sphere.

Indenture’s troubled borders between a subject who is both private and public, consenting and dependent, make it a unique space for challenging a key legal fiction of contract—namely, that the public body of the child inevitably fades into the private body of the adult and the child self must also follow the opposite path from privacy into the public sphere. This rethinking of how the individual is gradually bound into a larger population is, I argue, one of the principal tasks of two narratives of child indenture: William Apess’s autobiography, A Son of the Forest (1829), and Harriet Wilson’s semi-autobiographical novel, Our Nig (1859).2 Both texts turn on a child working in bondage to white families and trace that child’s progression into an economically unstable adulthood. While the texts are not usually read together, they both use the forms of indenture to reframe how unfree labor connects child bodies to the public sphere and how it subsequently shapes their relationship to the social world as adults. In her reading of Our Nig, Nazera Sadiq Wright has described the centrality of “survival skills” in Wilson’s message to her readers.3 This emphasis on survival as a literary mode operates within this larger network of law and practicality to create an argument about the politics of community. By centering consent to an agreement by children who have no other choices and, under most legal reasoning, no right to consent at all, Wilson and Apess rethink the bildungsroman to make it as much about finding and using basic necessities as about self-expression or finding a place in society. Because the consent attached to indentures is so explicitly artificial, it is a more effective tool for representing what it means to grow up as a child of color in the antebellum United States than it is as a sign of consent itself. Wilson and Apess respond to having their child selves excluded from sociability by imagining an alternative orientation set against the population at large.

I track Wilson and Apess’s use of indenture on two levels: first on the literary level as a subversion of the bildungsroman’s traditional use of the social contract and, second, on a more literal level, as a critique of labor contracts’ immediate effects on laborers. On both levels, the critique rests on the erasure of the body. For the first, the traditional bildungsroman glorifies the decision to abide in a society as the culmination and proof of personal freedom, neatly excluding the physical needs that might push a person to stay where they can at least have food and shelter. The second turns on the labor contract’s exclusion not only of the coercive effects of physical needs but also of the long-term effects that labor can have on the body. Through this erasure, labor contracts make the welfare of the working body into the exclusive concern of the worker. Using apprenticeship as a rare space in which the law does give bodies a momentary presence in the public sphere, Our Nig and A Son of the Forest make the physical needs of their protagonists an explicit part of the choices they make.

The centrality of indenture in these texts is, in some sense, banal. Indenture was a common feature of the lives of many children, and a document like the indenture of Cynthia Barns would have been commonplace. Its contents are entirely generic, listing the parties involved, then the term, then the duties of the apprentice, the reciprocal duties of the master and mistress, and, finally, a standardized concluding oath. It is a contract written under the conventions of a contract. Two parties have come to a potentially mutually beneficial arrangement, sanctioned and enforceable by law. It takes no special close reading, though, to see that the norms of contract just as absolutely do not apply to the seven-year-old Cynthia. Instead, the indenture offers a contract that takes place around her inability to consent. Her signature does not appear and the introduction lists “Select men” of the town who are making arrangements on Cynthia’s behalf. Regardless of these limitations on Cynthia’s consent, recognized even in the indenture binding her, the document nevertheless maintains the basic forms of contract and appears as if Cynthia’s consent can be safely stipulated without its actual inclusion. Cynthia Barns, as we know her through this document, thus appears as a curious inversion of market tendencies to emphasize the will and privatize the body. The indenture can try to anticipate her physical needs, but it avoids saying anything about what she thinks.

The status of the Cynthia Barns indenture as a not-quite contract relies on its connection to another and equally recognizable genre, that of the coming-of-age narrative. Spanning the girl’s life from seven to eighteen, the indenture sets out to imagine how she will progress from an impoverished and fatherless child to a skilled worker, equipped with personal property (on turning eighteen, Cynthia will also receive “two good suits of Cloths” and a Bible) and an ability to work for herself in making clothing. The resemblance is more than incidental. As this chapter will argue, the logic of an indenture like Cynthia’s relies on its narrative power to imagine this development of a child considered to be outside the social world to an adult with a place in it. By writing a contract around a subject whose consent cannot be registered in the document, indenture performs a quintessentially literary action of stipulating consent—positing that the child who cannot consent to a contract nevertheless has enough intrinsic agency to become an adult who retroactively agrees. Indentures, in other words, create narratives of development in which temporarily non-consenting children become grateful adults.

While I argue that Wilson and Apess draw on this link between legal and literary genres, Our Nig and A Son of the Forest have not been read exclusively, or even primarily, as bildungsroman. The latter, as a nonfictional account of Apess’s indenture with the white Furman family following abuse by his own family and also his eventual conversion to Christianity, is typically read as a synthesis of autobiography and conversion narrative and as a foundational piece of the genre that Arnold Krupat termed “Indian autobiography.”4 Anna Mae Duane has suggested that A Son of the Forest be read as a re-writing of captivity narratives and Puritan hagiography, while Laura Mielke notes the importance of sentimentalism to the text.5 Our Nig, meanwhile, focuses on the life of Alfrado, more commonly called Frado, a young Black girl who lives in the nominally free North but works in bondage for a white family until she reaches adulthood. Wilson herself had been indentured as a child due to family poverty in New Hampshire about a decade after Cynthia Barns was bound as an apprentice. Frado’s captivity, though, has often been read as a close analogue of slavery rather than as a distinct system in its own right. Similarly, though the autobiographical quality of the text is widely acknowledged, Our Nig is more often understood as an intersection between sentimentalism and the slave narrative than as a participant in the coming-of-age narrative itself.6

A more basic factor that tends to separate Wilson and Apess from the bildungsroman is the problem of their endings. Frado and William are difficult to slot into the traditional role of a character who has come of age because neither of the novels’ conclusions leave a sense of either character becoming reconciled with the social order or having an established place within it. By Our Nig’s end, which tracks its protagonist approximately through her twenties, Frado has left the Bellmont family, worked at sewing, learned to manufacture bonnets, returned to the Bellmonts, left again, married, had a child, been abandoned by her husband, and gone into business selling hair serum. As the text closes, Frado begins to write her narrative after having been forced to place her son with the poor house, and she has no prospects of escaping the institution herself except—here, Wilson juggles character and author—through the sale of the novel. William, meanwhile, moves from one apprenticeship to another, escapes, and joins the army and fights in Canada. After leaving the army, he works as a baker, a farmhand, a cook, and an itinerant preacher.7 The narrative concludes with William leaving the Methodist Episcopalian Church after they deny him a preaching license and setting out with an intention to join the Methodist Society. Belonging and stability exist, at best, on the horizon of these endings. Read through indenture law, A Son of the Forest and Our Nig give us a way of imagining the bildungsroman stripped of its neat resolution.

This generic restructuring has several implications. At the most fundamental level, it expands the genre to encompass lives lived in poverty or in and out of the edges of poverty. While it is common enough to encounter novels that begin with the young and poor, few end with such heroes. The proof of maturation tends instead toward the accumulation of capital and the stability that this capital can bring. As Jed Esty has written, the coming-of-age narrative has long operated as “the genre of progress” whether in showing that society can change to accommodate a new member or, more often, that young misfits can successfully warp themselves into the shapes demanded by society.8 Such novels equate growing bodies with growing economic power and use this equation to make a progression to the middle class appear like a natural trajectory. Unstable lives (in which no one profession ever lasts very long and no single home is permanent) along with overly stable lives (in which the same labor lasts from puberty until death and one’s hometown remains home) have had less of a place in this canon of upward mobility. Reshaping this narrative trajectory therefore also means ushering in new protagonists and substituting a wary sociability for any happy ending. Frado and William each need the people around them, but they are also not surrounded by safe people. Together, Wilson and Apess theorize the transactions and spaces of privacy needed to rely on social bonds without trusting them.

Child Bodies and the Law

Child bodies have an uncanny relationship with the law that even the basic terms of childhood reflect. While antebellum Americans would have used infant in everyday speech much the same way that we would now, legal writers used infancy to name a much longer stage of special status under the law. An early alternative for the category of the minor, the term infant was generally used to classify subjects under the age of either eighteen or twenty-one years old as holding different rights and duties than adult subjects.9 Yet, by modern categories of age and even by the term’s informal use at the time, the legal writing that emerges from this convention—in which phrases such as “infant females, at the age of sixteen”10 or “if the infant be a farmer” were commonplace11—feels like catachresis. The insistence that a twenty-year-old has less in common with a twenty-two-year-old than with a toddler or that notion that an infant might sometimes stand, plow a field, or read Latin likewise seem almost bizarrely disproportionate. The disjuncture of these images arises in part from the implied binary between infant and adult, in which maturity arrives all at once, but it also stems from a more basic break in how the law conceives of age. While infancy used informally summons up the deeply physical dependency of a subject unable to walk or perhaps even to sit unsupported, the parameters of legal infancy try to treat the details of the child body as though they were largely irrelevant to its classification. Instead, infancy stipulates bodily difference without permitting bodily presence.

Infant draws on the word’s origins, in-fans, or non-speaking, to name an imposed silence, a declaration that the speech of a minor could not properly be recognized in court as the sign of intention or testimony.12 As an 1835 analytical dictionary explains, legally, “a child is said to be an Infant as long as it is presumed to be unable to speak for itself in a Court of Justice.”13 Thus, within the realm of law, a phase that is more commonly aligned with biological development has come to index a set of absent or cancelled voices. Though practical nuances have always existed and state laws did make provisions for younger marriage or younger criminal responsibility, the speech of a twenty-year-old witness was theoretically grouped first with that of a three-year-old, no matter how physically different their capabilities might be. The uniform silence imposed on these varied bodies, however, also points to the law’s refusal to abstract civic identities from child subjects. In this constructed omission of child voices, the law thus traces the outline of a physicality that it was reluctant to acknowledge more directly.

It is the sense that children’s bodies do not work like adult bodies that drives the exclusion of children from the public sphere. Although legal infancy is a status apparently uninterested in distinguishing the details of how a newborn’s body might differ from that of a post-pubescent, its rationale relies on the idea that the actions done by a child body are not a reliable guide to the child mind. William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, a 1760s treatise on British common law and the central source text for antebellum law, distinguishes infancy from adulthood in criminal cases by emphasizing the difference between will and act. A crime must represent both a vicious will and a vicious act, but infants cannot comprehend their actions well enough to be responsible for them.14 Blackstone writes, “Where there is no discernment, there is no choice; and where there is no choice, there can be no act of t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index