I. Children in a Democracy

No brief formula adequately explains or summarizes the varieties of family and child life that existed in the United States by the early nineteenth century. Variety was bound to be the lot of a people drawn together through different means and for different purposes from the ends of the earth. Except for the inevitable disruption of their lives and a common sea voyage, the first migrants shared virtually nothing. Vast groups inherited contrasting cultural beliefs. Religious, class, and ethnic divisions abounded. Some even denied the humanity of others. What did slave children, immigrant children in city slums, children of pioneer farmers, children of a doctor or minister in a comfortable home, and the children of a proud aristocrat on a plantation or those of a wealthy New England merchant really have in common? Little more, one suspects, than the land itself; a mere geographical location, and even in that simple respect there was greater diversity in the American environment than in any of the many nations and provinces from which the ancestors of the American young had come. Little wonder then that experiences of childhood and youth are so elusive. At that early point in life when social institutions have had little opportunity to produce some semblance of uniformity, the spectrum of potential experience stretched wider than at any other time.

The difficulties of doing justice to the varieties of childhood are compounded by the paucity of records for all classes of children. Children themselves are incapable of producing records until they reach a certain age. Even then the inherent obstacles to expression are rarely overcome. Children of the middle class, however, figure in the literary contributions of adults. Reminiscences, school and other official records, imaginative literature, and traveler's descriptions contain numerous portraits of the favored child of white, native born parents who grew up in comfortable circumstances. The children of the poor, the immigrant, Negroes, and Indians rarely receive more than incidental mention, are only fugitive shades in the records of the past, and when they do appear are seen through the distorting prism of another's perception. Rarely do they speak for themselves. Consequently, the images formed of childhood are drawn from the middle class despite the fact that most children for most of American history grew up under different conditions and according to different rules.

By 1820 the middle-class American family did not merely duplicate Western European patterns of family life and childhood. The processes and principles of an individualistic, laissez-faire, white democracy were penetrating government, the economy, churches, and even so traditionally aristocratic an institution as the family. The Western world had not seen the like of the American family before. Many Europeans, with more fear than hope, sensed in American novelties the signs of their own future. A steady flow of travelers from abroad testified with nearly one voice to differences in tone and organization of family life and to the enhanced role of children in this new setting. They fully agreed that the American child was a new creature, although they disagreed over whether American parents should be praised or blamed for what they had done. Members of American families, some travelers averred, regarded themselves as equals, united, though often only temporarily, in a common endeavor for the pursuit of ends of mutual advantage. The hierarchical family, reaching its apex in the father, was undermined and finally leveled by the force of democratic social principles. The new model family encouraged its children to form new habits and attitudes of mind and temperament. American children were more independent, individualistic, and socially precocious than their European counterparts; they were less polite and deferential to adults. Many European travelers were appalled by the children's ready challenges to their parents' statements and their ceaseless assertion of their own views and personalities. Captain Frederick Marryat, a British naval officer and acidulous critic of democracy, believed that the power balance between American parents and their children was accurately depicted in this conversational encounter he overheard in the United States in 1837:

" 'Johnny, my dear, come here,' says his mamma.

'I won't,' cries Johnny.

'You must, my love, you are all wet, and you'll catch cold.'

'I won't,' replies Johnny.

'Come, my sweet, and I've something for you.'

I won't.'

'Oh! Mr. ————, do, pray make Johnny come in.'

'Come in, Johnny,' says the father.

'I won't.'

'I tell you, come in directly, sir — do you hear?'

'I won't,' replies the urchin, taking to his heels.

'A sturdy republican, sir,' says his father to me, smiling at the boy's resolute disobedience." [1a]

Happily, some observers were able to report that equality did not always lead to willful disobedience. Another Englishman watched a father and his fourteen-year-old son chatting and singing together during a train trip on terms of equality, respect, and affection. "There was no attempt," he wrote, "at keeping up the dignity of a parent, as might have been considered necessary and proper with us. There was no reserve. They were . . . already on an equal footing of persons of the same age." [1b] Middle-class children had become then the most republican and democratic of all Americans in their feelings and manners. Individualism, progress, and an opportunity for those like themselves to move ahead according to their merits and diligence were the guides to

their beliefs and the key to their behavior.

Owing in large part to the new status of children many American parents were puzzled about how to raise them. Parents had never, of course, been without advice in this important matter. Ministers had preached sermons and legislators had passed laws on the subject. In the first half of the nineteenth century, however, the initiative for such advice came from parents themselves. They were not simply responding to the wishes of others who wanted to pattern the lives of their children in ways that would maintain an orderly society. Instead, they searched for the proper ways of rearing children, implicitly confessing that changing times required a new approach. Many manuals on the proper methods of child-rearing appeared after the 1820's. Some looked toward a restoration of family relations on a traditional, hierarchical model, maintained by repeated applications of piety and discipline. Most, however, looked for a middle way between authority and permissiveness, in which family relations were governed by affection and maintained by mutual respect with severe discipline resorted to on only rare occasions. The ideal child was one who would be independent but in agreement on essentials with parents as a result of free choice. The welfare of children had become the preeminent goal of family life.

The legal status of American children was subject to conflicting pressures and interests. On the one hand, the welfare of the child—his prospects for personal growth and even happiness — was encroaching upon the rights of parents and the convenience of society as guiding principles in the law of family relations. Family law had been primarily established by judges in the course of deciding actual conflicts over the rights of parents and children, custody, and illegitimacy, with occasionally a statute to codify a trend or resolve inconsistencies. During the first half of the nineteenth century the judges' determination of the welfare of the child involved in a particular case began to override the formal rights of parents, particularly fathers. This trend was most apparent in custody cases. Courts began to favor mothers in disputes over custody on the grounds that the child's future welfare depended upon a mother's care. A willingness to restrict the authority of a parent was one important result of the enhanced social status of children to which so many testified. On the other hand, racial biases deprived some children of this concern for their future well-being. When the children of free and slave Negroes encountered the law, their interests were regularly subordinated to those of someone else.

The child with one free and one slave parent was regarded as illegitimate because marriage of slaves had no legal foundation. Children of slaves were still denied legal protection for family life, although, as before, some masters tried to keep families together. As in many other ways, the black child paid for the ease, convenience, and profit of the white.

Negro and Indian children of the early nineteenth century are more visible to historians than were their predecessors. Few personal documents exist from earlier times; some sources, however, for the study of the lives of nineteenth-century children of black and red minorities have been preserved. Plantation account books and letters between masters and their overseers contain information about relations between owners and slaves, one-sided as the point of view always is. Many documents of value derive from the abolition movement. Many fugitive slaves and freedmen left accounts of their travails and escapes. These sources serve to counterbalance a one-sided view and to give depth of understanding to black experience and history. Their existence testifies to the weakening hold of the slave system. As there were more fugitives, and as they came into contact with sympathetic, educated persons or learned to read and write, they drew up accounts of their lives in slavery and escape that served as an inspiration to the abolition cause and an impetus to the education of Negroes. These accounts reinforced points known or suspected for a long time. They made clear, often in the most graphic language, the sufferings of slave families, the disregard of masters for ordinary human decencies in their regulation of slaves, the sacrifices that slaves and free Negroes were willing to make in each others behalf, and the risks they were willing to run in order to be free. Perhaps no single event was more persuasive in convincing white Americans that blacks were indeed human beings and deserving of humane treatment than the appearance of slave narratives. They taught that heroism, self-sacrifice, and idealism could all exist in a black man. The most famous of these documents was Frederick Douglass' Narrative. A man of energy and intelligence, Douglass devoted himself after his escape from slavery to the advancement of the abolitionist cause, lecturing widely throughout the North, publishing several newspapers, and participating in the affairs of abolitionist organizations. His life was a refutation of the racist assumptions so prevalent through the South and widely accepted in the North. His account of it, written in a clear and affecting style, probably did more than any other work by a black author to convince whites of the great injustice and degradation of a slave system which tried to bind such a man to a life of labor for others.

The slave system itself was outwardly thriving and expansive. Carried westward as southerners advanced from the seacoast states to the interior, it was fastened firmly into the economic and social life of the Southwest. The planting of the fertile soil of the Gulf states created a steady and sometimes spectacular demand for slave labor. Slaves in gangs with their masters or in the coffles of professional traders moved westward. Although masters of the Old Dominion and other eastern and border state areas with a surplus of slaves often prided themselves on their refusal to break up slave families, they were under such relentless pressure to sell that only the most scrupulous could resist. Perhaps at no other period were there more frequent and more frequently valid charges of slavemongering and the deliberate breeding of slaves for a distant market. The expanding economy of the nineteenth century added to the prosperity and self-confidence of the country, but for black children and their parents progress all too often meant only more work and the pain of separation.

Indian children found themselves in an unenviable situation. The traditional tribal ways were being subverted by American culture. Deprived of effective allies by American domination of the continent, the Indian tribes were thrown back upon their own inadequate resources to stem the tide of frontier advance. With fewer and fewer exceptions they recognized the hopelessness of their cause. Indian parents tried to continue to raise their children in time-honored ways appropriate to the nomadic, rugged life so many of the tribes pursued. In fact, before American power rendered ineffectual the Indian's defenses and destroyed their trust in themselves and the ways of their ancestors, their life together exhibited qualities envied by those whites who traveled among them and observed their customs without distortions of bias and fear. In particular, they pointed out the affection Indian parents, especially fathers, had for their children and the efficient way they reared the children to assume an acknowledged place and role in tribal life. Their lives, often enough, were hard and brief, but they had the security and self-respect that resulted from knowing that traditional ways worked. The future held no such satisfactions for them. Caught between the dying world of tribal culture and the inattainable world of white society, Indian children were destined for a limbo of misunderstanding and neglect.

1a. Frederick Marryat, A Diary in America (London, 1839), III,284-285.

1b. Foster Barham Zincke, Last Winter in the United States (London, 1868), p. 71.