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Nature, nurture, nation: race and childhood in transatlantic American discourses of slavery

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Nature, nurture, nation: race and childhood in transatlantic American discourses of slavery

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NATURE, NURTURE, NATION: RACE AND CHILDHOOD
IN TRANSATLANTIC AMERICAN DISCOURSES OF SLAVERY

by

Lucia Hodgson

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)

August 2009

Copyright 2009 Lucia Hodgson

ii

Epigraph

The "Enlightenment," which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.
- Michel Foucault
iii

Dedication

To Nick
iv

Acknowledgments

This project would not have been possible without the consistent and patient
support of the members of my dissertation committee, Carla Kaplan, John Carlos Rowe,
Joe Boone, and Karen Halttunen.
I am also very grateful to the USC English Department for helping me to secure a
generous amount of funding from a variety of sources, to the Huntington Library, and to
Peter Mancall and the USC Early Modern Studies Institute.
Thank you to my mother and siblings for their emotional and financial support.
Thank you to Dr. Lunt for everything. And thank you to my special birds: Emily,
Andrew, and Beth.

v

Table of Contents

Epigraph ii

Dedication iii

Acknowledgments iv

Abstract vi

Introduction 1
Endnotes 19

Prologue American Locke: Infantilizing Slavehood, 21
Racializing Childhood in Early America
Endnotes 79

Chapter One Revolutionary Childhood 88
Endnotes 139

Chapter Two Black Atlantic Childhood 145
Endnotes 174

Chapter Three Early National Childhood 177
Endnotes 224

Epilogue Race and Childhood in Mid-Nineteenth-Century 227
American Literature
Endnotes 246

Bibliography 249
vi

Abstract

By the 1850s, the analogy between African-American slaves and children had
become a truism, so embedded in American culture and so ubiquitous that it effectively
eluded interrogation. This dissertation argues that the slave/child analogy has roots in the
adaptation of the political, epistemological and educational writings of John Locke to the
British American colonial context, that it was crucial to transatlantic American discourses
of race and slavery from the Revolution to the Civil War, and that it configured and
racialized American representations of the child during the same period. This project
illustrates how the representation of slave subjectivity in American textual culture in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries mirrors (and distorts) three key facets of modern
childhood: its incapacity for reasoned consent, its position on the border of the
human/animal divide, and its malleability. Historically, the slave/child analogy has
helped to justify the slave’s exclusion from political participation and national belonging
and to naturalize his/her subjection to absolute authority and to disciplinary educational
practices. At the same time, the analogy produces instability and dissonance that facilitate
the deconstruction of dominant ideologies of race, gender and class. The figure of the
slave child, in particular, crystallizes the illogic and incoherence of the analogy.
In the Revolutionary Era, the slave/child analogy facilitated the colonial bid for
independence from imperial control, while its overtly racialized form, the Negro/child
vii
analogy, supported an inferior political status for subjects of African descent in the new
nation. In the decades immediately following the Revolution, the analogy was
transformed by the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, becoming infused with an early
Romantic primitivism. The idealization of the primitive inverted the Lockean binaries
that underwrote imperialism, providing a mechanism for transatlantic writers to question
American slavery and racial ideology. By the early nineteenth century, however,
American Romantic idealizations of Africans and children laid the groundwork for the
emergence of racist science and the endurance of American white supremacy. Authors
considered in this study include Thomas Jefferson, Phillis Wheatley, William Blake,
Olaudah Equiano, Ann Taylor, Jesse Torrey, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne,
and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

1
Introduction

Tom . . . had the soft, impressible nature of his kindly race, ever yearning toward the
simple and childlike . . . .
Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe

[T]he individual negro. . . . is but a grown up child, and must be governed as a child . . . .
Sociology for the South, or the Failure of Free Society (1854) by George Fitzhugh

By the 1850s, the "negro"/child analogy had become a truism, so embedded in
American political and popular culture and so ubiquitous that it effectively eluded
interrogation.
1
Writers for and against the institution of slavery wielded the analogy to
support their positions. It constituted a discursive common ground for white writers on
the topic of slavery, regardless of the specifics of their policy proposals, and it signaled
their agreement about the inferiority of African-Americans to European-Americans. The
analogy's rhetorical value did not, however, signify its rhetorical coherence. Rather,
through reductive repetition, the analogy's perpetuation obscured its inherent
incoherence. Children in modern western culture are, by definition, endowed with the
potential to become adults; they "do not yet possess the necessary attributes of citizenship
. . . but will possess them in the future."
2
In John Locke's influential formulation,
"Children . . . are not born in [a] full state of equality, though they are born to it."
3

Through the course of time and the process of education, children become adults. To
refer to an African-American adult as a "grown up child" who "ever yearn[s] toward . . .
the childlike" is illogical. Children grow up and mature; a child who will never become
an adult is not, strictly speaking, a child. The figure of the African-American child
instantiates the fallacy of the negro/child analogy since it underscores that all African-
Americans cannot possibly be children in the same sense of the term. The absurdity of the
2
analogy racializes the representation of childhood. To avoid destabilizing dissonance, the
ideal, unmarked child in American literature during slavery is ethereal and white like
Stowe's Evangeline St. Clare, while the black child figure is absent or grotesque, an "odd
and goblin-like" "thing" like Topsy.

When self-evident laws of nature guarantee freedom, only equally self-evident laws of
equally self-evident nature can account for its denial.
4

[A]n idea of 'the child' is a necessary precondition of imperialism—that is . . . the West
had to invent for itself 'the child' before it could think a specifically colonialist
imperialism . . . .
5

Colonial and early national American racial formations developed in relation to
British liberal natural law, whose theory of universal freedom necessitated that slavery be
explained. The enslavement of people from the continent of Africa and their descendants
in North America proliferated discourses of human difference. These discourses
constituted a racial ideology that maintained the inferiority of Africans to Europeans, and
associated Africans (and later all enslaved and dark-skinned inhabitants of North
America) with a fundamental incapacity for self-government due to their purported
irrationality, savagery, and simplicity. This dissertation argues that the late seventeenth-
century British "discovery" of the child
6
—"the not yet fully evolved or consequential
subject"
7
—provided American racial ideology with its most foundational, persuasive, and
enduring analogy: the "Negro" as child. In turn, the deployment of the child figure as a
justification for enslavement configured and racialized American representations of
children. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Negro and the child
3
were mutually constituting subjectivities whose rhetorical relationship sometimes
challenged, but more often sustained, the oppression of African Americans.
The invention of the Negro as subject and the representation of Negro subjectivity
in American textual culture from the Revolution to the Civil War mirror (and distort)
three key facets of modern childhood: its incapacity for reasoned consent, its position on
the border of the human/animal divide, and its malleability. The apparent logic of the
Negro/child analogy draws support from the tenets of liberalism, the organizing binaries
of modernity, and the premises of Enlightenment educational theory. These modern
discourses justify the Negro's exclusion from political participation and national
belonging and naturalize his/her subjection to absolute authority and to disciplinary
educational practices. At the same time, the Negro/child analogy produces instability and
dissonance which facilitate the deconstruction of dominant ideologies of race, gender and
class. The figure of the Negro child, in particular, crystallizes the illogic and incoherence
of the analogy. However, the two terms—Negro and child—have been from their
Enlightenment origins so thoroughly intertwined and interdependent that their separation
borders on the unthinkable. To question the analogy is to question the discursive edifice
of the modern western understanding of the world.
The Negro/child analogy that this study traces emerged in the early eighteenth
century with the British North American system of slavery. It had discursive roots in the
political, epistemological and educational writings of John Locke, and it was produced
and perpetuated by the adaptation of Lockean concepts of childhood, human difference,
and subject formation to the colonial American context. These adaptations racialized
4
Lockean discourse and its constituent terms: man, nature, and reason. In the
Revolutionary Era, the slave/child analogy facilitated the colonial bid for independence
from imperial control, while its overtly racialized form, the Negro/child analogy,
supported an inferior political status for subjects of African descent in the new nation. In
the decades immediately following the Revolution, the analogy was transformed by the
writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, becoming infused with an early Romantic
primitivism. The idealization of the primitive inverted the Lockean binaries that
underwrote imperialism, providing a mechanism for transatlantic writers to question
American slavery and racial ideology.
By the early nineteenth century, however, the Romanticization of the "African"
facilitated the shift in racial ideology from condition to essence which laid the
groundwork for the emergence of racist science. Influenced by British attitudes toward
slavery and race transmitted across the Atlantic through children's literature, both pro-
and anti-slavery American writers deployed the Negro/child analogy to advocate for the
removal of African-Americans from the national body. American Romanticism hinged on
the evolution of the white child whose irrationality, animality, and spirituality could not
detract from its national belonging. The Negro/child analogy reached the peak of its
ubiquity and influence in the antebellum era, underwriting dominant pro- and anti-slavery
arguments, and playing a major role in the success of blackface entertainment and the
endurance of American white supremacy. The analogy survived the end of slavery,
continuing to shape the textual representation of childhood and racial discourse arguably
into the present.
5

Liberalism’s commitment to principles of universality is practically sustained only by the
reinvented and rationalized exclusions of racial particularity.
8

Despite its ubiquity in American discourses of race and slavery, the negro/child analogy
receives little scholarly attention. It is often mentioned in passing as a standard feature of
the landscape of nineteenth-century American racist ideology, but its history and
mechanics are neither remarked upon nor scrutinized. It is as if the analogy's cultural
work is so self-evident and straight forward that it doesn't require comment. The absence
of commentary is all the more striking considering the key role the analogy plays in
facilitating the paradoxical coexistence of freedom and slavery in the American
imagination, "the presence of the unfree within the heart of the democratic experiment."
9

Critical race theorists have successfully challenged the "exceptionalist" explanation of
early American democracy which argues that Thomas Jefferson and his peers established
a government founded on the principle of equal rights, but simply failed to extend their
universal principles to white women and people of color. From this perspective, the
eventual extension of suffrage to women and African-Americans fulfilled the promise of
equal rights latent in American democracy; the founding fathers' support for slavery and
their exclusion of all but white males from political participation constituted only "a lapse
in the rigorous application of a universalizing judgment."
10
Theorists have countered the
exceptionalist paradigm by noting that universalism is always qualified by particularism,
that "[b]oth American and European imperial discourses subscribed to universalist
principles and particularistic practices."
11
In Etienne Balibar's striking formulation,
universalism is a form of racism.
12

6
This study accepts the imbrication of universalism and racism, but it also moves
beyond this argument to examine how liberal theory narrates the necessity of excluding
certain bodies from its purview. I argue that early American natural rights rhetoric
deployed the modern figure of the child to conceptualize and naturalize the inferior
political status it assigned to Africans and their descendants. As Balibar illustrates, the
theory of universal rationality assumes as its subject an ideal, superior individual who is
necessarily not typical of every individual. The "core" of the liberal subject "is
constituted by a double, or even triple relationship which is presented as a hierarchy in
nature itself." In Aristotelian terms, he exists as a universal in relation to the woman, the
slave, and the son.
13
Universalism is only conceivable to the extent that it displaces
natural human difference (in sex, intellect, and maturity, for example) to the "periphery"
of liberal subjecthood "beyond which the universal no longer applies."
14
Scholars have
examined how liberal universalism produce an ideology of white, male, able-bodied
supremacy, but not how it also inevitably produces an ideology of adult supremacy.
Although white women and people of color continue to experience prejudice and
disadvantage, American movements challenging their oppression have a relatively long
history. However, it remains absurd to question the exclusion of children from the
exercise of natural rights, a freakish impetus that manifested itself briefly in the 1970s at
the fringe of even that decade's radical counter-culture movements. I am not arguing here
for the equal rights of children or the sameness of children and adults. I am suggesting
that the negro/child analogy works so well at particularizing the universal because the
exclusion of the child from universal liberal subjecthood lies beyond the scope even of
7
contention. Interrogating the negro/child analogy can deepen our understanding of how
racialized slavery existed at the heart of American freedom for over two hundred years.
Foregrounding the child figure also promises to extend our understanding of the
transatlanticism of American discourses of slavery and race. The most influential studies
of the Lockean child in America, including Jay Fliegelman's Prodigals and Pilgrims
15
,
have treated the concept as if it were transported to the colonies intact and unmodified.
16

My study is indebted to Toni Morrison and Paul Gilroy whose work has exposed the
racial contours of American identity. As these important scholars suggest, Enlightenment
subjectivities emerged in the context of the traffic in and enslavement of African bodies,
and I have extrapolated from their claims to make my argument that American childhood
has been raced from its inception. The unmarked American child subject is white,
dependent for its coherence on what Morrison calls "a dark, abiding, signing Africanist
presence."
17
Specifically, the fulfillment of the developmental trajectory of the American
child is dependent on the African-American adult; "there is no way," for example, "for
Huck to mature into a moral human being in America without Jim."
18
What my project
adds to Morrison's observations is an examination of how the Africanist presence she
identifies works to shape and whiten modern American childhood through the trope of
the African-American as child.
Like Morrison's "Africanist presence," Gilroy's theory of diaspora also
complicates the traditional approach to understanding the transatlantic origins of
American childhood. Diasporic identity is a "transcultural mixture" that defies "scripts of
ethnic, national, racial, or cultural absolutism."
19
American childhood identity cannot be
8
reduced to the nationality of one's progenitors or the location of one's birth, and it neither
reflects nor respects national boundaries. Rather, like a plant, a person's identity reflects
its "social ecology"; identity develops from a seed subject to an unpredictable and unique
constellation of environmental factors. To explicate the metaphor, these factors are the
transatlantic discourses that, in Judith Butler's terms, simultaneously enable and constrain
subject formation.
20
In this project, I connect Gilroy's diasporic "alternative to the
sedentary poetics of either soil or blood" to the nature/nurture paradigm that organizes
modern child development theory; the "shift . . . away from the effects of original sin, to
the effects of socialization—a growing environmentalism . . . is the hallmark of the
emerging Enlightenment."
21
The Enlightenment project of isolating nature from culture is
integral to narrating both child identity and racial theory, as it is "the busy traffic of
nature and culture . . . [that] articulates racial formations."
22
As we will see, narrating the
potential developmental trajectory of the child and theorizing the relative impact of
nature and nurture in subject formation are crucial to textual representations of racial
difference.
As I have implied above, scholarship on early American childhood tends to ignore
its implicit whiteness and its imbrication in discourses of slavery and race. Some of the
scholarship in the relatively new field of Childhood Studies, an offshoot of cultural
studies, has considered some aspects of the role of race in childhood subject formation.
This consideration is consistent with the field's guiding theory that narratives of child
subjectivity, however much they are informed by the child's physiological traits, are
culturally determined and historically contingent. However, the majority of the work
9
concerning race focuses on abolitionist literature written for children by women between
the 1830s and the Civil War. On the whole, scholars have argued that abolitionist
children's literature, despite its anti-slavery stance, reinforces contemporary theories of
white racial superiority and African-American inferiority.
23

Caroline F. Levander has also written about antebellum abolitionist children's
literature, but her work is exceptional in that she links her findings about the period to the
role of the child figure in shaping slavery discourse in the 1760s and 1770s. She argues
that abolitionist children's literature of the 1820s through the 1860s underscores the
necessity and acceptability of an inferior social status for blacks. Moving beyond what
other childhood studies scholars have attempted, Levander connects the racial logic of
antebellum children's literature to the role of the child figure in revolutionary era rhetoric.
She argues that this earlier child figure "organizes the new nation through a logic of white
supremacy," in such a forceful way that "even after slavery is abolished, color continues
to operate as a powerful organizing principle of U.S. national identity."
24
Levander is
right to insist that the white American child works to establish racial difference in the
new nation, to associate national citizenship with whiteness, and to facilitate the
transformation of blacks into racialized others excluded from full citizenship. However,
her teleological reading that finds the racial logic of Uncle Tom's Cabin in revolutionary
rhetoric obscures significant developments and shifts in the American discourses of race
and childhood between the 1760s and the 1820s. My dissertation complicates Levander's
work by incorporating into my analysis of childhood the shift in racial discourse from
10
environmentalism to essentialism that occurs between the Revolutionary and Antebellum
eras. The role of childhood in racial discourse is as varied as racial discourse itself.

From their simultaneous origins in the seventeenth century, definitions of the African and
of the child were intertwined. Discourses of human difference are constitutive of the
modern worldview that emerged in the wake of the colonization of the Americas. The
forced transportation and enslavement of African populations shaped the emerging
Enlightenment disciplines of natural history and natural rights. These "natural"
disciplines considered all kinds of human difference, but were particularly centered on
two demarcations: the distinction between European and African and the distinction
between adult and child. Within the major works of John Locke, published between 1690
and 1693, we can see the complex and overdetermined network of associations that
linked the African and the child. By this last decade of the seventeenth century, the
enslavement of Africans and their descendants was an entrenched feature of all the
British colonies in North America, and colonists had already begun the process of
establishing practices and laws that enforced and justified their institution of racialized
slavery. Locke's writings are clearly informed by the dynamics of British colonization.
He both contributed to colonial legal rhetoric concerning slavery and produced one of the
most influential modern defenses of slavery within a natural rights framework. At the
same time, he invented the secular science of child development, with its emphasis on the
child's lack of reason, proximity to the animal, and amenability to discipline. Over the
course of the eighteenth century, these three characteristics of the child would become the
11
three racial traits most consistently associated with the African in colonial America and
the early United States republic.
Before Locke, childhood had more to do with social status than with age. Young
people of the upper classes could participate in government and wield power over
household dependents, while even old people of the lower classes were considered
"children" of their rulers and employers.
25
Locke' child was a person under the age of
discretion, regardless of class, whose rationality was necessarily underdeveloped when
compared to an adult. This lack of rationality rendered the child's political participation
and consent inappropriate. In explicating his theory "That all men by nature are equal,"
Locke explains children's subordination to paternal power by arguing that they are "born
infants . . . without knowledge or understanding"; these "defects" and the justification for
the child's subjection both disappear with "the improvement of growth and age."
26
Locke
uses the rationale for the child's inequality to explain the inequality of adults who have
not attained the necessary "improvement" and "degree of reason" by the age of discretion,
including "lunatics," "ideots," and "madmen."
27
Although more firmly connected to age
and physiology, Lockean childhood status is also transferable to adult bodies. In liberal
theory, the child figure operates as a placeholder for other subjects whom the government
deems incapable of self-government. While previous understandings of childhood
indicated the subordinate social status of adults deemed "children," Lockean childhood
also conferred the traits of irrationality and ignorance to infantilized adults, constituting a
compelling justification for their disenfranchisement.
12
By establishing rationality as the key indicator of full humanity and by
emphasizing the irrationality of non-Europeans, Locke's rhetoric contributed to the
modern discourse that infantilized Africans. Organizing men and animals according to a
chain of reason grounded in literacy, Locke's epistemology conflated children with
"savages" and animals.
28
The three separate developmental trajectories that undergird
theories of man in natural history discourse—child to adult, savage to civilized, and
animal to human—are overlaid in Lockean rhetoric, reinforcing the Aristotelian
association between the undeveloped, "lower" forms of life: children, members of
primitive societies, and non-human animals. The underlying narrative that gives the
association structure is classical recapitulation theory. According to this theory, the
development of the individual human (phylogeny) recapitulates or renacts the
development of the human species (ontogeny). The child begins life as a primitive man
who is more animal than human. The logic of recapitulation theory equates "civilized"
children with "savage" adults and denies the savage adult the capacity to become
civilized within a single lifetime. In order for recapitulation theory to maintain its
coherence, the savage, even when fully grown, can never supersede the developmental
level of the (civilized) child.
29
Locke's system of evaluating forms of life according to a
rationality manifested in literacy paved the way for natural history discourse that
categorized Africans as chronic children, animal-like "savages," incapable of developing
into European adults because they lacked the literacy to become fully human.
Locke's popularization of the theory that the child's mind, like the mind of
primitive man, was a tabula rasa or blank slate helped modern disciplinary practices to
13
assume the guise of necessary and benevolent power. If childhood and savagery were
manifestations of absence, then civilized societies and adults had not only the right, but
the duty, to control the bodies and minds of children and savages. Locke was also
instrumental in establishing the malleability of children and the child-like. Children's
minds were not only blank, but also "as easily turned this or that way as water itself."
30

Locke's widely read writings on education stressed that the child's body and mind could
be molded to desire and fear anything given consistent habituation. This approach
accorded nurture a much greater role than nature, and it transformed the child into a
material site for the production of empirical evidence about human nature. An obedient
child was a testament to the correctness and efficacy of disciplinary practices. On the
other hand, to the extent that a child did not respond to habituation, its nature could be
construed as defective. Locke's educational theory implied that the inhabitants of Africa
could be trained to revere European society and desire even life as a slave in the colonies.
The idea that the African was infinitely malleable conflicted with the belief that it was
against the African's nature to attain the level of a civilized European within a lifetime.
The contradiction was resolved through the nature/nurture paradigm which attributed any
perceived failure to perform obedience or rationality to nature rather than nurture, race
rather than environment.
Locke's theories of childhood outlined above continued to hold sway in American
culture through the end of slavery, but their influence was significantly transformed by
the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau adapted the Lockean framework of
childhood, but he destabilized its hierarchies. In Locke's view, the child was inferior to
14
the adult, and the development from childhood to adulthood was a linear trajectory from
defective to normal. For Rousseau, the child was superior to the adult in certain ways,
and the development from child to adult was one of loss as well as gain. Rousseau's
philosophy provided the Romantic movement with its idealization of childhood qualities,
and facilitated a Romanticized view of Africans and an argument for African racial value,
if not superiority. Rousseau's work also centered the role of gender in childhood which
Locke had effectively marginalized. But Rousseau's views did not undermine the concept
of racial difference, and in the main, difference from the white adult ideal continued to
operate as an indicator of mental inferiority and a mechanism of political disadvantage.

The prologue of the dissertation, "American Locke," shows how John Locke's discourse
of childhood established the terms for rationalizing and racializing slavery in the British
North American colonies. I begin by examining Locke's association between
childrearing, labor and race in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693). My reading
of the childrearing advice of Thomas Tryon, who packaged Locke’s ideas for a colonial
slaveowning audience, illustrates how Locke’s educational theory became the basis for a
racialized labor strategy in the Americas.

The first main section of this prologue
foregrounds Bishop William Fleetwood's collection of sermons on household government
written for a transatlantic slave-owning audience, The Relative Duties of Parents and
Children, Husbands and Wives, Masters and Servants (1705), to document the way in
which the child figure produced by social contract theory became white in the American
context. Fleetwood grafted the language of household dependents in Locke's Second
15
Treatise of Government (1690) onto the domestic realm of the slave-owning colonies,
racializing social contract rhetoric and producing a child subject who was understood to
be free and white, and who developed in comparison with and in contrast to the slave
subject, who, from the 1680s on, was characterized as unfree and "Negro." The second
section of the chapter charts the rise of the pernicious theory of the "Negro's" intellectual
inferiority that colonists used to rationalize the slave's and the "free" African-American's
exclusion from full civil status. Through a close reading of Cotton Mather's catechism for
slaves, The Negro Christianized (1706), and several of his catechisms for white children,
I show how Mather makes an argument for African inferiority by drawing on Locke's
theorizations of child reasoning in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690),
in which Locke equates the rational capacity of children with that of adult "savages" and
the "higher" animals. Mather's deployment of Locke facilitated a catechistical philosophy
that granted slaves a reasoning ability sufficient for conversion to Christianity, but
insufficient for civil liberty.
In my first chapter, "Revolutionary Childhood," I turn from the colonial
adaptation of Locke's theories to the way in which American revolutionaries deployed the
Lockean child figure, first to ground their claims against the Mother Country in natural
rights rhetoric, a position that temporarily enforced the natural rights of children and
potentially slaves, and then, after 1773, to mark their own adulthood, a position that
subordinated and silenced all those deemed dependent, including children, women,
Native Americans, and slaves. I argue that the young enslaved African girl, Phillis
Wheatley, gained access to the public sphere in the early 1770s by positioning herself as
16
a child subject and not as a slave, and how her untimely disappearance from print culture
registers the disenfranchised and marginalized status of "dependent" voices in the new
nation. By reading Wheatley's writings in the context of the revolutionary pamphlet
debates, this chapter shows how rhetorical deployments of the slave-child analogy against
political slavery promoted revolutionary possibilities for the increased political
participation of all children that were subsequently thwarted by an emergent theory of
racial difference that insisted on childlikeness as antithetical to political authority, and as
a chronic and permanent trait of Africans of all ages and their descendants.
In my second chapter, "Black Atlantic Childhood," I consider how in the late
eighteenth century, Americans scrutinized the life stories of Africans enslaved as children
for evidence about the extent to which racial traits were innate or acquired, and about the
educability of Africans and their descendants. I expose the dependence of arguments in
the 1780s concerning the legitimacy of the slave trade on the nature/nurture paradigm
that was promoted by Locke's figuration of the child's mind as a blank page, and was
proliferated dramatically by the vogue of Rousseau's educational theories. During this
period, British and American writers, including Olaudah Equiano, William Blake,
Anthony Benezet, Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Phillis Wheatley, Belinda Royall, and Ottobah
Cugoano narrated the African child figure's relationship to his environment and
experiences to challenge Enlightenment binaries that privileged whiteness and literacy,
and that conflated children and "Negroes" with each other, and with chronic and innate
irrationality and primitivism. Narrated African childhoods were strategic attempts to
prove that African societies were rudimentary but capable of "civilization," and that
17
individual Africans were not culturally or physiologically inferior to Europeans when
environmental factors were taken into account. I conclude the chapter by showing how
the cultural backlash of the 1790s coopted and diffused the radical implications of the
Lockean trope of the child as infinitely malleable.
My third and final chapter, "Early National Childhood," illustrates how the
relative fluidity of racial categories based in climate theory that had been exploited by
Equiano, Blake and others to challenge white supremacy, gave way in the first decades of
the nineteenth century to stock African characters in British and American abolitionist
poetry and fiction embedded in an ideology of racial essentialism. I argue that early
nineteenth-century colonization rhetoric in favor of relocating Northern "free" Blacks
beyond American borders adapted a British Romantic discourse of Africanity to explain
the necessity and promise of emancipating American slaves gradually and sending them
to Africa to cultivate its resources for national profit. The literary romanticization of
Africa stereotyped the vast continent as the "land of childhood" and the African as a
perpetual child. The accompanying discourse of racial essentialism linked all Africans in
the American diaspora as similarly childlike--inassimilable, incapable of education for
national belonging and self-government, and well-suited to agricultural labor. American
colonization rhetoric masked the ways in which the articulation and implementation of
Northern gradual emancipation policies pivoted on the exploitation of the labor of black
children, and on the relegation of generations of Northern blacks to the status of
permanent "foreigners."

18
In the Epilogue, I conclude this project by considering some of the ways that a
focus on the analogy between slaves and children can enhance our understanding of
canonical American literature of the mid-nineteenth century. I will consider three
works—Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), The
Scarlet Letter (1850), and Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)—through the prism of the
child/slave analogy and the associated nature/nurture paradigm.
19
Endnotes

1
Arguably, contemporary scholars continue to treat the child/slave analogy as rhetorical given whose
genealogy does not need to be traced or explained. For a very recent example, see Ezra Tawil, The Making
of Racial Sentiment: Slavery and the Birth of Frontier Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006). In an
brilliant analysis of racial discourse in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Tawil grants the analogy a cursory sentence:
"Thus, like the child—another important thought-figure for this philosophical tradition ["Locke’s famous
metaphor of the wax tablet"]—the negro is the perfect Lockean ‘substrate,’ ready to receive impressions
and hence capable of exemplary sensibility," 167-168. For an influential example from 1970s historical
scholarship that addresses the analogy but not its origins or dynamics, see Ronald Takaki, "The Black
Child-Savage in Antebellum America," in The Great Fear: Race in the Mind of America, eds. Gary B.
Nash and Richard Weiss (New York: Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 27-44.
2
Barbara Arneil, "Becoming Versus Being: A Critical Analysis of the Child in Liberal Theory," in The
Moral and Political Status of Children: New Essays, eds. David Archard and Colin M. Macleod (Oxford
UP, 2002), 70.
3
John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing,
1980), 31.
4
Barbara Jeanne Fields, "Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America," New Left Review
181 (1990): 107.
5
Jo-Ann Wallace, "De-Scribing the Water Babies: The Child in Post-Colonial Theory," in De-Scribing
Empire, eds. Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson (London: Routledge, 1994), 176.
6
For the seminal argument about the seventeenth century "invention" of childhood, see Philippe Ariès,
Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (New York: Vintage, 1962).
7
Ibid., 176.
8
David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Oxford, UK: Blackwell,
1993), 39.
9
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
UP, 1992), 48.
10
Warren Montag, "The Universalization of Whiteness: Racism and Enlightenment," in Whiteness: A
Critical Reader, ed. Mike Hill (New York: New York UP, 1997), 284.
11
Ann Laura Stoler, "Tense and Tender Ties: North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies,"
Journal of American History 88, no. 3 (2001): 846.
12
Etienne Balibar, "Racism as Universalism," in Masses, Classes, Ideas (Routledge, 1994), 195.
13
Ibid., 196.
14
Montag, "Racism as Universalism," 286-287.
15
Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-
1800, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982).
16
I am grateful to Nancy Armstrong for this observation.
17
Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 5.
20

18
Ibid., 56.
19
Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line, (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap P, 2000, 123-126.
20
Judith P. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 1997).
21
Roger Cox and Olive Stevenson, Shaping Childhood: Themes of Uncertainty in the History of Adult-
Child Relationships (London: Routledge, 1996), 49.
22
Donald S. Moore, Anand Pandian, and Jake Kosek, "Introduction: The Cultural Politics of Race and
Nature: Terrains of Power and Practice," in Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference, eds. Donald S.
Moore, Jake Kosek, and Anand Pandian (Duke UP, 2003), 1.
23
For example, Sarah N. Roth's article, "The Mind of a Child: Images of African Americans in Early
Juvenile Fiction," argues that children's fiction in the 1820s and 1830s taught its readers that "respectable
whites did not belong on the same social level as blacks of any class." By presenting "black characters who
displayed above all else a childlike docility and a heartfelt devotion to their white benefactors," this
literature left "a cultural legacy that would legitimate the denial of the manly privileges of political and
legal equality to African American men in the North" (79-80). In "'A is an Abolitionist': The Anti-Slavery
Alphabet and the Politics of Literacy," Martha L. Sledge considers the ways an 1846 abolitionist alphabet
uses children "both to challenge the nineteenth-century politics of slavery and to perpetuate white, middle-
class social hierarchies" (69). In this alphabet, the "white, middle-class child-audience is invited into the
alphabetic world, the world of literacy, while the black slave who is the impetus for the text is kept outside"
(80). Lesley Ginsberg, in her article "Of Babies, Beasts, and Bondage: Slavery and the Question of
Citizenship in Antebellum American Children's Literature," illustrates how abolitionist rhetoric in the
1830s and 1840s conflates children, slaves and animals, and how abolitionist imagery for children "can be
read as retreats from demands for full citizenship, as odes to female subordination, and as apologies for
slavery" (87). In a rare focus on black children and abolitionism, "Out of the Mouths of Babes: The
Abolitionist Campaign of Susan Paul and the Juvenile Choir of Boston," Lois Brown tells of Susan Paul,
African American abolitionist and educator who had her students sing abolitionist songs about slavery and
racial prejudice. This story shines light on "how free African-American children were educated about
slavery, freedom, and racism" (53) in the antebellum North, and on how one woman gave a small group of
African-American children "unprecedented opportunities for artistic and political self-expression in a
society normally committed to denying them any such voice" (54).
24
Caroline Levander, Cradle of Liberty: Race, the Child, and National Belonging from Thomas Jefferson
to W. E. B. Dubois (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006), 33.
25
Holly Brewer, By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority
(Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2005).
26
Locke, Second Treatise, 31-32.
27
Ibid., 33-34.
28
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995).
29
Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1977).
30
John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education and Of the Conduct of the Understanding, eds. Ruth
W. Grant and Nathan Tarcov (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1996), 10.
21
Prologue: American Locke

John Locke established the terms in which modern childhood would be
understood and modern childrearing would be practiced in the eighteenth century in the
west. He has played a particularly significant role in defining American childhood. His
writings on politics, epistemology, and child management were tremendously influential
in the early American context in which British colonists sought models and
rationalizations for social policies that favored an elite of white adult males, including
delimited enfranchisement, displacement of indigenous peoples, and enslavement of
Africans and their descendants. Locke's claims about children's malleability and
underdeveloped capacity to reason bolstered early American efforts to keep power,
property, wealth, and other resources in the hands of the few, even and especially in the
face of Locke's egalitarian rhetoric deployed to justify American independence from
Britain. Locke's characterization of children facilitated the association between children
and non-elite adults, an association which Locke himself made, that acted as one of the
dominant rationales for social and political inequality in the young republic. This
association combined with Locke's prescriptions for the treatment of children led to
treatment of all children and those adults deemed child-like that aimed at and often
succeeded in reproducing early American structures of power by keeping individuals in
their designated place in the emerging raced social hierarchy of the American colonies.
This prologue on Locke's influence on the discourses of childhood, slavery and race in
22
the early eighteenth century British colonies argues that the Lockean child was crucial to
the processes of legitimizing slavery and naturalizing race in early America.
Scholars generally credit John Locke's writings with a politically and
psychologically progressive view of the child. The contemporary narrative of John
Locke's influence in eighteenth-century America praises his contribution to "enlightened"
modes of thought about how to govern children. In his influential study, Prodigals and
Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800, Jay
Fliegelman connects Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) to "a new
parental ideal characterized by a more affectionate and equalitarian relationship with
children" which "paralleled the emergence of a humane form of childrearing that
accommodated the stages of a child's growth and recognized the distinctive character of
childhood."
1
In this chapter, I explore an alternate trajectory of Locke's influence in the
new world that connects his famous child rearing manual with the racialized discipline of
children in British North American colonial households, identifying a discursive link
between Locke's conception of childhood and new world discipline, and underscoring a
dark side of the Enlightenment notion of children's malleability.
Locke's Some Thoughts sketches a link between the child's bodily malleability and
physical labor that had great resonance for colonial societies.
2
Locke devotes almost half
of his childrearing tract to the management of children's bodies. He treats "the health of
the body" before "the minds of children" because though shaping the minds of children
"be the principal part, and our main care should be about the inside, yet the clay cottage is
not be neglected."
3
Locke describes his advice as "suited to our English gentry"
4
and
23
"designed for a gentleman's son,"
5
yet the section on children's bodies seemingly cuts
across class lines. He writes that his theory on managing child "health," "perhaps might
be all dispatched in this one short rule, viz. that gentlemen should use their children as the
honest farmers and substantial yeomen do theirs."
6
And his major emphasis is on inuring
the child to physical hardship through habituation. He preaches the total malleability of
the child body, claiming that children's bodies can be habituated to any activity in any
environment provided that the habituation process begins early enough in the child's life.
He writes: "Our bodies will endure anything that from they beginning they are
accustomed to."
7
He recommends, among other things, exposure to cold, a meager diet,
and a hard bed.
Locke's interest in the connection between the child's bodily malleability and
agricultural labor is also evident in his single reference to race in Some Thoughts. He
supports his argument about children's bodily malleability by repeating a story from a
traveler's account:
'The heats,' says he, 'are more violent in Malta than in any part of Europe'
they exceed those of Rome itself, and are perfectly stifling; and so much
the more, because there are seldom any cooling breezes here. This makes
the common people as black as Gypsies: but yet the peasants defy the sun;
they work on in the hottest part of the day, without intermission or
sheltering themselves from his scorching rays. This has convinced me that
nature can bring itself to many things which seem impossible, provided we
accustom ourselves from our infancy. The Maltese do so, who harden the
bodies of their children and reconcile them to the heat, by making them go
stark naked, without shirt, drawers, or any thing on their heads, from their
cradles till they are ten years old.
8

24
Here, Locke links his own childrearing theories with the strategies the Maltese use to
transform their children into agricultural laborers who perform well in tropical
environments.
Locke's association between childrearing, labor and race in Some Thoughts
became the basis for a racialized colonial labor strategy in the Americas.

We can trace
Locke's influence in the work of Thomas Tryon through the cultivation metaphor for
childrearing. Thomas Tryon, a London merchant, was a contemporary of John Locke's.
He wrote how-to tracts addressed to a colonial audience that covered a wide variety of
subjects, including temperance, animal husbandry, and money management. The market
for his work reflected the fact that colonists were obsessed with developing disciplinary
methods for extracting labor from indentured servants and slaves without unnecessarily
damaging their laborers or inciting resistance and rebellion. In his article, "Plantation
Factories and the Slave Worth Ethic," Gerald Jaynes stresses the fact that it was "to the
master's advantage to devise some means of eliciting voluntary labor from his slaves."
Masters sought "an attitude to work among the slaves that would bring forth adequate
quantities of labor without the debilitating effects of the whip."
9

Tryon was particularly concerned with the treatment of African slaves on the
colonial plantations. His Advice to the Gentlemen-Planters of the East and West Indies
published in 1684 contained a "Treatise of the most principal Fruits and Herbs that grow
in the East & West Indies," a complaint in the voice of a "Negro-Slave" about plantation
labor conditions, and a dialog between a "Negro-slave" and a Christian about masters' un-
Christian treatment of their slaves. Two years after Locke published Some Thoughts in
25
1693, Tryon published "A New Method of Educating Children" which paraphrased many
of Locke's theories. In a letter Tryon wrote entitled "To a Planter of Sugar," contained in
a collection of letters published in 1700, Tryon attempts to convince the sugar planter to
take up cotton manufacturing as well, because producing large amounts of sugar,
according to Tryon, is a "violent and cruel Art." The letter warns planters that the "black
Character of Oppression and violence, the Sugar Plantations do now lye under" will only
increase if they do not change their methods. Tryon promises that the use of his methods
will "stem the Current of Groans, Sighs, Melancholly Lamentations, and Turmoil of your
Servants, into a pleasant, calm, serene Life, of happy Employements," and that "the
Masters of each Family shall enjoy many degrees more quiet, and be freed from those
continual troubles and care they now labour under."
Tryon presents his methods as the solution to recalcitrant and rebellious slaves,
and to the tremendous violence required to control them. Tryon's solution to the planters'
problems is for them to raise a portion of their children to manufacture cotton products.
In recommending that the children begin the trade at age four or five, Tryon draws on
Locke's insistence that children be inculcated when very young into their future calling.
In Some Thoughts, Locke subtly invokes the child/crop metaphor: "The great mistake I
have observed in people's breeding their children has been, that this has not been taken
care enough of in its due season, that the mind has not been made obedient to discipline
and pliant to reason when at first it was most tender, most easy to be bowed."
10
In
restating Locke's theory, Tryon mixes the metaphor of childrearing as writing on paper
26
with the agricultural metaphor of cultivation, signaling the connection between rearing
children and producing agricultural laborers. Tryon writes:
it is very clear that the early cultivation and sowing seed in due season,
crowns the action: Children are like white paper at first, before it be
sullyed, or ill customs and characters stamped, you may sow what seed
you please.

One of the things that happens in the course of Tryon's adaptation of Locke is that
childrearing methods become racialized. Tryon recommends that two schools be
provided for plantation children: "one for the children of the English, the other for the
children of the slaves, Black servants." Tryon does not explain why the children should
be segregated. We can assume that he recognized that white and black children on
plantations would experience very different labor conditions, even within the same trade.
And, as Locke's theories argue, children must be inured when very young to the
particular conditions of labor they are slated to experience as adults.
North American Childhood and Postcolonialism
Tryon's adaptation of Locke suggests that the Lockean discourse of human malleability
spoke to imperial anxieties about managing dependents and their labor in the colonies.
The imperial context of Locke's work has been well established, but his writings on
childrearing have not been connected to the management of slaves—young or old—in
British North America.
11
Ann Laura Stoler suggests that postcolonial work on
childrearing and empire is also relevant to the early North American colonial context. It
is one of "those microsites of governance [that] may reveal how North American histories
and those of empires elsewhere compare and converge."
12
In her work, Stoler identifies
27
child rearing as one of the "intimate domains . . . [that] figure in the making of racial
categories and in the management of imperial rule," and, as such, child rearing can help
us recognize the imperial dimensions and disciplinary mechanisms of early American
culture.
In reading Locke's discourse of childhood in a colonial context, I am responding
to a call from Paul Gilroy and Toni Morrison, among others, for a (re)analysis of
modernity that acknowledges the crucial role of racial ideology and new world slavery in
the production of Enlightenment subjectivities, particularly in the production of the
"white" person. They have challenged literary scholars to recognize the role of Black
Atlantic and Africanism respectively in Enlightenment narratives. According to Gilroy, if
we adopt "an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective" on the modern period,
we will find that "the universality and rationality of enlightened Europe and America
were used to sustain and relocate rather than eradicate an order of racial difference
inherited from the premodern era." Enlightenment conceptions of universality and
rationality, including those of Locke, entrenched racism. Like white women who are
"sign[s] for the repressed or irrational other of rationality identified as male . . . . blacks
enjoy a subordinate position in the dualistic system that reproduces the dominance of
bonded whiteness, masculinity, and rationality." Gilroy counsels that we "rethink the
meanings of rationality, autonomy, reflection, subjectivity, and power in the light of an
extended meditation both on the condition of the slaves and on the suggestion that racial
terror is not merely compatible with occidental rationality but cheerfully complicit with
it."
13

28
In her work on the place of Africanity in the American literary imagination, Toni
Morrison points up what she calls the "the sycophancy of white identity" and "the
parasitical nature of white freedom." White identity and freedom, depend on black
identity linked to enslavement and debasement. "The rights of man, . . . an organizing
principle upon which the nation was founded was inevitably yoked to Africanism. Its
history, its origin is permanently allied with another seductive concept: the hierarchy of
race," Morrison writes. "The concept of freedom did not emerge in a vacuum. Nothing
highlighted freedom—if it did not in fact create it—like slavery." Accordingly, the white
child is a product of new world slavery, and his/her whiteness accrues meaning from an
overdetermined opposition with blackness. White stands for European, civilized,
Christian, and free, while black equals non-European, savage, heathen, and slave.
14

This chapter will read John Locke's writings on childhood as texts that produced
the universal child as a white male and the new world slave as an ageless black, and
promoted a technology of rearing infants so as to reproduce their social status in and on
their bodies. Locke's discourse on childhood laid the groundwork for inculcating young
bodies in the British American colonies into their predetermined social roles as either
white citizens or black slaves. Rather than participating in the somewhat elusive search
for Locke's beliefs and intentions, this project will illustrate how Locke's use of language
enabled what Charles Mills has termed the "Racial Contract" of American society that
perpetuates white supremacy. The "general purpose of the Contract," he writes, "is
always the differential privileging of the whites as a group with respect to the nonwhites
as a group, the exploitation of their bodies, land, and resources, and the denial of equal
29
socioeconomic opportunities to them."
15
I contend that Locke's writings on children,
slavery, rationality, and the social contract provided the discursive framework for the
entrenchment of the racial contract in American culture.
Locke's Social Contract and Colonial Slavery
The whiteness of the idealized fictional children of nineteenth-century American
literature—epitomized by characters like Eva St. Clair, Pearl Prynne, Huckleberry Finn,
and Little Lord Fauntleroy—has roots in the early eighteenth-century adaptation of social
contract theory to emerging British American colonial societies that institutionalized the
enslavement of Africans and their descendants. This colonization of social contract
theory deployed a slave-child analogy to familiarize and domesticate the political
subjectivity of the new world slave by comparing it to the apolitical status of the child. At
the same time, American writings kept the two interdependent terms—slave and child—
distinct through a racialized discourse of household government that understood the
colonial child to be white, the colonial slave to be black, and the colonial child-slave to
be a contradiction in terms. Race was as central to the discourse of American childhood
as it was to the discourse of American slavery.
Scholarship that explores the influence of John Locke on the American culture of
childhood tends to ignore the question of race.
16
This section of the Prologue argues that
Anglican Bishop William Fleetwood's collection of sermons on household government,
The Relative Duties of Parents and Children, Husbands and Wives, Masters and Servants
(1705), grafted the language of household dependents in John Locke's Second Treatise of
Government (1690) onto the domestic realm of the slave-owning colonies in order to
30
cater to an audience of British subjects whose livelihoods depended on coerced African
labor in the new world. The resulting discourse of colonial childhood was irrevocably
imbricated in and transformed by the discourses of slavery and race. Locke's social
contract theory positioned children and slaves in a rhetorical relation of analogy that
forced them to be mutually constituted and differentiated. The colonial slave system
required the racial categorization of young bodies, and therefore produced a race-specific
discourse of childhood.
17
In adapting Lockean theory to colonial slave societies,
Fleetwood's sermons racialized the rhetoric of the social contract, producing a child
subject who was understood to be free and white, and who developed in comparison with
and in contrast to the slave subject, who, from the 1680s on, was characterized as
"Negro." In Fleetwood's sermons, as in mid-nineteenth century American literature, the
representation of the free white child and that of the black adult slave were
interdependent for their meaning, and virtually unthinkable without each other.
18
As a
result, both racist discourse about the inferiority of African-Americans and ostensibly
enlightened discourse about the special nature of (white) children contributed to
maintaining the institution of slavery.
As his surname connotes, William Fleetwood, bishop of Ely, began life as the son
of a sea captain. Educated at Eton College and King's College, Cambridge, Fleetwood
rose through the ranks of the Anglican church to become a chaplain to William III and
Mary II after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. He was a popular and influential Whig
figure from then on until his death in 1723. He preached regularly to distinguished
audiences, including "the king, both houses of parliament, the mayor and corporation of
31
London, and other public bodies." He was also a member of the Society for the
Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), an organization established by the
Church of England in 1701 to promote Anglicanism, the official religion of England,
among the European, indigenous, and enslaved African inhabitants of the British West
Indian and North American colonies.
19

Fleetwood's Relative Duties substantively shaped the religious domestication of
slavery in the British American colonies. Jon Butler argues that the "unique Anglican
domination of Christian institutional life in the late seventeenth-century southern colonies
dictated Anglican dominance of public comment on slavery." Fleetwood's sermons were
"crucial" to the development of a planter slaveholding ethic with regard to their slaves,
and went a long way toward resolving "the dilemma created by Whiggish morals in an
expanding slave society." The Anglican discourse of empire shaped the material practices
of slavery and the racial ideology used to rationalize such practices; it "fitted with
uncanny precision the elaboration of slave codes and social behaviors that increasingly
specified the degraded condition of captive Africans after 1680."
20
Imperial discourse
developed its racial ideology in great part through its inclusion of slaves in social
mandates about the appropriate government practices for British colonial households. By
incorporating colonial slavery into the literature of domestic governance, Fleetwood
helped defenders of slavery naturalize the institution. Through discursive domestication,
the master's authority over his slave and the slave's duty to obey his master could be seen
as grounded firmly in scripture, cultural precedent, and natural law.
32
In addition, as mid-nineteenth century discourse about slavery illustrates, the
Anglican colonization of social contract rhetoric provided American culture with a
widely used and effective way to position slaves in the household and in the body
politic.
21
As the child's unfreedom became an accepted facet of American society,
characterizing slaves as children provided an explanation for their enslavement, and the
mitigating factor of the parental "Biass of Nature" toward children became a defense of a
master's absolute authority over his slave.
Pre-Lockean Household Government Discourse
Fleetwood wrote Relative Duties in the generic tradition of seventeenth-century British
household government manuals. Affiliates of the state church composed these manuals in
part to dictate a household structure that reinforced the state's political structure. The first
and most reprinted—A Godly Forme of Houshold Government (1598)—echoed the
language used by King James I in a pamphlet printed the same year to defend and
rationalize his divinely-sanctioned, absolute monarchic rule. James' The Trew Law of
Free Monarchies: or The Reciprock and mutuall duetie betwixt a free King, and his
naturall Subjects (1597) described the relative duties of a king and his subjects through
the deployment of the ancient analogy between state and household.
22
James' patriarchal
theory of government held that his subjects owed the same absolute obedience to him as
children owed their fathers, and had as little right to participate in the terms of their
subjection as children have a right to have a say in their government by the head of the
household. James refuted the argument that the king at his coronation made a "contract"
with his people that could be broken if the king didn't live up to his stipulated duties.
23

33
The subject-child analogy facilitated the defense of absolute authority so well
because the paramount duty of a child in the early modern period was total unquestioning
obedience to paternal authority as long as the father lived.
24
In reference to The Trew
Law, Constance Jordan argues that, "To see the subject as a child, as James did, allowed
the monarch almost limitless freedom of will."
25
James maintained the pretense that
resistance of any kind on the part of children to parental authority was so "monstrous and
unnaturall" that he would condone popular rebellion if it could be countenanced:
[I]f the children may upon any pretext that can be imagined, lawfully rise
up against their Father, cut him off, & choose any other whom they please
in his roome . . . then I cannot deny that the people may rebell, controll,
and displace, or cut off their king at their owne pleasure, and upon
respects mooving them.
26

The Trew Law used the king-father analogy to naturalize James' claim to an absolute
authority that could not be challenged by his subjects regardless of how poorly, unfairly,
or harshly they were governed. For James, the ideal subject, could no more choose or
change a king's absolute rule, than a child could choose or change a father.
Household government manuals in the seventeenth-century echoed and reinforced
the patriarchal characterization of state authority.
27
They inverted the state-household
analogy deployed by James, arguing that the structure of household authority should be
modeled on the absolute authority of the king. Godly Forme stated that "the order of a
family . . . is an imitation of a state civill, or body politicke." The manual opened with the
claim that, "An Houshold is as it were a little Commonwealth," and stressed that "the rule
of parents over their children, ought to resemble the government of good Princes towards
their subjects."
28
In Godly Forme, as in patriarchal discourse, the status of the child
34
represented the ideal of absolute political subjection, the rhetorical anchor of the
patriarch's absolute authority.
Manuals promoted a patriarchalist model of household authority which explained
"social hierarchies in terms of natural (or divinely sanctioned) status"; as with absolute
monarchy, consent to a contract was neither required nor appropriate. Although
seventeenth-century household servants often entered into labor contracts with their
masters, Godly Forme did not discuss master/servant relations in contractual terms.
Rather, it repeatedly equated the servant's relationship to his master with the child's
relationship to his father, regardless of the age of the servant.
29
Servants had as little right
or need to consent to the terms of government by the household head as the children of
the house. "The housholder is called Pater Familias," Godly Forme instructed, "because
he should have a fatherly care over his servants, as if they were his children."
30

Household government manuals were part of the mechanism by which patriarchalism
subsumed rival contractual accounts of authority through the end of the seventeenth
century.
31

When Fleetwood composed and published his household management opus,
Relative Duties, in the first decade of the eighteenth century, he faced a very different
political landscape than his predecessors. The coronation of William and Mary in the
Glorious Revolution of 1688 rested on an agreement that their monarchy was not to be
absolute, but would be limited by the laws passed by an independent parliament. Status
had given way to contract as a favored explanation for the legitimacy of state authority,
and the tension between patriarchal and contractual representations of government had
35
resolved itself "in favour of the contract."
32
Unlike the authors of Godly Forme a century
before, Fleetwood also had to contend with a reconfiguration of the British household
that had occurred on the ground in the North American colonies. Many colonial Anglican
households contained one or more African slaves, who might themselves be among those
having the sermons read aloud to them. In response to these challenges, Fleetwood
published sermons that simultaneously contractualized and racialized family relations.
John Locke and Household Government
My reading of the sermons collected in Relative Duties reveals that Fleetwood clearly
drew his rhetoric of ideal household relations from John Locke's Second Treatise on
Government (1690), the most popular, most persuasive contemporary defense of both
William and Mary's government and Christian slavery. Scholars continue to disagree
about whether Locke wrote his Second Treatise to support the reign of William and
Mary, but they agree that after 1688, Locke's social contract theory "did in actual fact
justify the Revolution to posterity, as well as to contemporaries."
33
Fleetwood used Locke
to articulate household authority in terms that would be appropriate for the subjects of a
government based (in theory) on the contractual consent of the governed that
simultaneously embraced a pointedly non-contractual form of slavery. The sermons'
deployment of the Two Treatises reflected the early eighteenth-century colonial British
organization of dependent political subjectivities into white children, white servants, and
black slaves. Fleetwood's sermons document the way in which the child figure produced
by social contract theory became white in the American context.
36
Contract theory transformed the nature of and the rationale for the child's
subjection to parental authority that organized patriarchal theory.
34
In Locke's regime, the
household was related to the state not through analogy but through dissimilitude. Locke
reconfigured household relations in such a way that a father's power could no longer
convincingly be used to justify absolute rule. His critique of the patriarchal child-subject
analogy was two-pronged: On the one hand, he denied that paternal power was absolute,
and, on the other, he refuted the general idea that state power was paternal in nature. He
accused Sir Robert Filmer, author of Patriarcha, of promoting a view of fatherhood that
was so draconian that its use as an analogy reduced children and subjects to a form of
slavery. And he insisted that, in any case, state power was not comparable to the authority
of the paterfamilias. In Two Treatises, Locke sought to untangle the ancient state-
household metaphor, to distinguish "the power of a magistrate over a subject . . . from
that of a father over his children, a master over his servant, a husband over his wife, and a
lord over his slave."
35
In the process, Locke modernized the language that established and
explained the political subjection of children, servants, and slaves.
To conform the household to his theory of government based on consent of the
governed, Locke mapped the modern subjectivities of child, servant and slave in
contractual terms. The servant, like the wife, was assigned a contractual relation with the
head of the household, and thus the state, while the child, like the slave, remained in a
non-contractual relation to all authority. Locke's subject was emphatically not a slave or a
child; by definition then, slaves and children were not subjects, and did not consent to
authority, whether familial or civil. Locke's Second Treatise illustrates that the shift from
37
patriarchy to contract was not total.
36
Rather the contractual status of the subject
depended on the patriarchal, contractless subordination of the child and the slave. And
this dependence implicitly united the child and the slave, much as traditional seventeenth-
century household government had constantly equated the child and the servant.
Locke's emergent distinction between servants and slaves institutionalizes the
raced division between white servants and black slaves that had become common
colonial practice by the time Locke was writing his social contract theory. In the
seventeenth century in England, although a tradition of contractual thinking about
obligation existed, it did not extend to relationships within the household. Even servants,
who often had contracts with their masters, assumed the position of a "child" once
employed. "They owed their masters and employers the same filial obedience that parents
could expect from their children."
37
As Locke worked to free the male servant from
arbitrary, patriarchal or "domestic" rule, he reinforced noncontractual rule over slaves. In
the process, he asserted a difference between slaves and servants that did not exist either
in Filmer, in seventeenth-century domestic conduct manuals, or in British common law.
The servant occupied the realm of contract and civil society, while the slave was
subsumed under "domestic rule."
After Locke, the child-servant analogy was no longer viable in the colonial
context. A servant was someone who agreed to exchange his service for wages for a set
period of time. Though this agreement put the servant under the authority of a master,
"into the family of his master, and under the ordinary discipline thereof," according to
Locke, the master's authority was clearly mitigated by contract. Though a part of the
38
master's household, the servant was not therefore like the master's child. For Locke, the
servant's role "gives the master but a temporary power over him, and no greater than what
is contained in the contract between them."
38
Like the subject of government, the servant
in Locke's social contract theory must consent to his subordination in the household.
Locke's child did not formally contract to be under the authority of his father, but
there was in the Lockean family what Susan Dwyer Amussen calls an "implicit contract"
between a father and his child, that was also temporary.
39
The father's authority was
mitigated by this duty of nurturance. It did not extend to adult children past the age of
discretion (customarily age twenty-one), as it had in traditional patriarchal households. It
did not "extend to life and death." The purpose of fatherhood was to govern the child
until the child was old enough to govern himself, and to prepare him for self-government:
Paternal or parental power is nothing but that which parents have over
their children, to govern them for the children's good, till they come to the
use of reason, or a state of knowledge, wherein they may be supposed
capable to understand that rule, whether it be the law of nature, or the
municipal law of their country, they are to govern themselves by.
40

According to Locke, parental authority was naturally in the child's best interest. God had
equipped parents with "affection and tenderness" for their children and therefore parental
authority was "not intended to be a severe arbitrary government, but only for the help,
instruction, and preservation of their offspring." The head of household's authority over
the slave, in contrast to his authority over servants and children, was mitigated neither by
formal nor implicit contract. It lacked any element of reciprocity or limitation. It was total
and perpetual: "slaves, who being captives in a just war, are by right of nature subjected
to the absolute dominion and arbitrary power of their masters."
41

39
To justify the exclusion of the child from the right to consent, Locke argued both
that young people lacked sufficient reason and self-control to enter into contracts,
requiring adults to contract for them, and that they didn't need to consent to paternal
authority, because such authority was temporary (lasting until the child reached
adulthood) and ordained by nature to conform to the child's needs. Unlike the slave,
however, the child had the right to be trained for and to age into adulthood and consent.
Locke famously asserted that children in a nation based on consent of the governed were
born "to" equality, but not "in" it. They were subject to the authority of their parents until
they reached the age of discretion precisely so that they could later become self-
governing. In Locke's formulation, children's "bonds of subjection" to their parents were
like the swaddling clothes they art wrapt up in, and supported by, in the
weakness of their infancy: age and reason as they grow up, loosen them,
till at length they drop quite off, and leave a man at his own free
disposal.
42

Fleetwood's Relative Duties (1705)
When Fleetwood turned to Lockean language to justify parental authority, he broke from
the discursive tradition of seventeenth-century household government manuals. He
emphasized a secular "rational" justification for parental authority over the traditional
scriptural one. Previous sermons on children's duty based parental power on the Fifth
Commandment of the Old Testament: "Honor thy father and mother." But in this early
eighteenth-century sermon--partially targeted at those Anglicans who owned slaves--
Fleetwood repeatedly evoked a justification based on "Reason" rather than simply divine
"Command"; the language of his "Reason" came directly from John Locke's social
40
contract theory in Second Treatise of Government (1690). Fleetwood's rendition of the
parent-child bond echoed Locke's explanation for children's subjection, but it altered its
dominant imagery. In a sermon in Relative Duties, entitled "Duty of Children to Parents,"
Fleetwood wrote:
The Customs of the World, and Reason, consent in giving People still
more Liberty, the older they grow: They are not to be Masters of
themselves whilst young, because their Reason and Understanding are
imperfect; they have not Judgment enough to consider what is good or evil
for them; their Passions and Affections are strong and prevalent, and
always looking towards Pleasure; and they have not Consideration enough
to correct or check the Disorders of their Will, and Desires: and if these be
the true Causes why they ought to be subject to the Will and Command of
Parents and Superiors, whilst young, it is but fit, that as these wear off, and
Reason and Understanding, and Judgment succeed, their Chains should
also wear away, and their Restraint lessened, and they should grow up to
full Liberty.
43

Fleetwood replaced Locke's metaphor of "swaddling clothes" with "chains." This
rhetorical gesture signaled the imbrication of British enlightenment political philosophy
and new world slavery that occurred in Fleetwood's sermons.
The colonial enslavement of Africans and their descendants was central to
Fleetwood's interpretation of Lockean social contract theory. In contractualizing the
household according to a Lockean map, Fleetwood replaced the traditional analogy
between the child and the servant of the pre-slave British household with the social
contract association between the child and the slave. In the new world context, this meant
that the European child and the African slave in the colonial household shared a
discursive field. In replacing the image of swaddling bands with that of chains,
Fleetwood's sermon signaled the significance of slavery to early American conceptions of
41
childhood. The author's turn to the chain metaphor indicates the great extent to which the
practices of new world slavery permeated and shaped the discourse of childhood in
colonial American culture, and elucidates the way in which the representation of
childhood was crucial to the process of racialization that undergirded colonial slave
systems.
Fleetwood colonized and racialized the Lockean child/slave association in ways
that reflected and reinforced practices of slavery in the British North American colonies.
Fleetwood's attitude to new world slavery, like his attitude toward limited monarchy, was
consistent with mainstream British state policy. It informed the basic ideology of what
Rowan Strong calls "Anglican imperial discourse." The Church of England promoted
British imperialism through the SPG by offering a religious doctrine tailored to the
demands of the triangular Atlantic trade in slaves and goods. Through the publication and
wide dissemination of sermons, the Church fashioned a Christianity that held "no threat
of slave freedom, or to the commerce in slaves."
44
In the tradition of Anglican imperial
discourse, Fleetwood's language fused traditional theology with enlightenment political
philosophy in the service of British trade and colonial expansion, creating a language of
"theological Enlightenment understanding."
45
In the process, Fleetwood created the
racialized subjectivities of child, servant and slave that were integral to the
institutionalization of colonial slavery in the early eighteenth century. Fleetwood's
household government discourse worked to shape colonial subjectivities that
strengthened the power of colonial patriarchs over their domain of dependents,
particularly their children and their slaves. Through widespread publication and
42
dissemination of Fleetwood's sermons, the Anglican Church helped to enforce racialized
identities that would sustain rather than challenge colonial slavery, including that of the
white child who would submit to authority until he reached a certain age, and the black
slave who would submit perpetually to absolute authority.
Fleetwood's discursive solutions to the challenge of contractualizing the new
world household reconfigured British household government discourse. In reconciling
Locke's family with the colonial context, Fleetwood carefully clarified the difference
between children, servants, and slaves, stressing the contractual nature of all familial
relations, except for the master/slave relation. Following Locke, Fleetwood based the
servant's privileges and obligations on his contract with his master; he construed the
father-child relation to be functionally, though not formally, contractual; and he pointedly
excluded the master-slave relationship from having any contractual elements. In addition,
he repeatedly emphasized the importance of not treating children like slaves.
Fleetwood makes the Lockean distinction between servants and slaves in Relative
Duties in the context of an explication of Pauline doctrine in which strangely he puts
Locke's words into Paul's mouth. The New Testament verses traditionally used to
structure advice to household heads and their dependants did not lend themselves easily
to a household that contained both servants and slaves. Paul hadn't mentioned slaves. In
fact, the Ephesian household structure, when applied to British colonial households,
threatened to collapse the raced distinction between servants and slaves on which the
colonial slave system relied.
46
If God had intended for there to be both servants and
43
slaves in the household, with significantly different duties and privileges, why had the
gospels not given direction to that effect?
Fleetwood insisted that though Paul addressed only one class of laborers,
"servants," he was exhorting both servants and slaves to perform their duties to their
master. Paul was not, however, suggesting that the two types of servitude were the same.
Paul, according to Fleetwood, "said the same Words to [servants and slaves], in different
Senses," depending on their status. The meaning of Paul's advice depended on the social
status of his listener:
To the Slaves and Captives he would say, Obey your Masters in all
Things, as becomes your sad Condition, and make your Chains as easy as
you can, by your Compliance and Submission: But to the hired Servants
he would be understood to say, Obey your Masters in all Things,
according to your Contract and Agreement; behave your selves as
diligently and faithfully, as you have promised them to do, or by the
Custom of the Place are presumed to have promised them.
47

Like Locke, Fleetwood's St. Paul believed that a master's authority over his servant was
dictated by contract, while a master's authority over his slave consisted of "Chains."
Although Fleetwood characterized children's subordination to their parents as
being in "Chains," he went to great lengths to distinguish between children and slaves.
Fleetwood entreated parents not to treat their children "slavishly." He insisted that
children "are not Slaves, but may receive injury." Children, he wrote, "are not tied like
Slaves in all Cases, and with Bonds that will last for ever." Rather, children's obedience
depended, as Locke suggested, on the nurturance their parents provided. When parents
failed to provide for their children's well-being, they "cancelled the Bond of Nature" that
44
legitimated their authority. By contrast, nothing could cancel the "Bond" between masters
and slaves.
48

Fleetwood's emphasis on the informal yet ideologically contractual nature of the
parent-child relation underscored the modern view that all relationships required mutual
duties in order to be legitimate. "I take it for a Rule, and granted," he wrote, "that there is
no Relation to the World, either natural or civil, and agreed upon, but there is a reciprocal
Duty obliging each Party."
49
Yet Fleetwood avoided the implication that the master-slave
bond could be "cancelled" because of action or inaction on the master's part. Fleetwood's
discourse fit the terrain of colonial slavery. The emerging servant/slave distinction in the
colonies was built on the presence or absence of contract, which was in turn highly
correlated with the emerging distinction between free "whites" and enslaved "blacks."
Steve Martinot has argued that in early Virginia the conditions of English servitude
became more dependent on contract, while "the elite began to legislate a differential
status for Africans, based on the absence of contract.
50

In his effort to school his listeners/readers in types of servitude, particularly so
that slaves would not mistakenly believe that they enjoyed the rights or privileges of
servants, Fleetwood wielded the term "Christian Servants":
But that which I would chiefly show hereby, is this, that all Servants, not
being alike Servants, but of different Sorts and Degrees, are not alike
obliged to obey their Masters in all Things, but are at Liberty in some
Particulars, according to their Contracts and Agreements…. And that
being the Case and Condition of all Christian Servants with us, is the only
Case that is to be considered by us, in speaking to the Duty of Servants.
51

45
By limiting his discussion of servitude to those with "Contracts and Agreements,"
Fleetwood excluded slaves, and therefore Africans and their descendants, from the
privileges enjoyed by servants. He reinforced this exclusion with the term "Christian."
Fleetwood was aware that the term "servant" without the modifier, "Christian," could be
construed to include slaves, but that with the religious modifier, could only refer to non-
African servants. In colonial discourse, the term "Christian" often operated as a substitute
for the term "white."
52
In using the term "Christian Servants," and in deploying a
contractual distinction between servant and slave, Fleetwood ratified the racialized
distinction between servitude and slavery in the colonies.
Fleetwood's Relative Duties facilitated the inscription of racialized subjectivities
in the colonies by rehearsing mechanisms of racial discrimination that were crucial to the
perpetual enslavement of Africans and their descendants—the distinction between
servants and slaves, the distinction between children and slaves, and the related exclusion
of slave youth from the privileges of childhood. Reproducing a racialized hereditary slave
society required the categorization of every young person into child or slave, "white" or
"black." In particular, perpetuating a racialized slave class required categorizing the
racial/social status of two groups of young people: those entering the colonies without an
indenture, and those born in the colonies to enslaved women.
According to colonial custom and eventually colonial law, the treatment of
incoming children depended on their nationality of origin and pigmentation.
53
As early as
1642, the Virginia Assembly began to legislate the treatment of English servants entering
the colony without a contract. Since the vast majority of English arriving without
46
indentures were under sixteen, one element of the law was to mandate the assessment of
the young person's age in order to establish a term of indenture. However, Virginia
custom did not mandate that African youth either have their ages assessed or be assigned
terms of service. The term of service for slaves was life, and therefore the age of those
destined to be enslaved had little legal importance. A law passed by the Virginia
Assembly in 1670 makes the racialization of this procedure clear:
all servants not being christians imported into this colony by shipping
shalbe slaves for their lives; but what shall come by land shall serve, if
boyes or girles, untill thirty years of age, if men or women twelve years.
54

According to Kathleen Brown, this statute excluded arriving nonindentured English and
European servants and captured Indians ("what shall come by land") from slavery.
English, European, and Indian children, then, had to have their ages assessed so that they
could be given set terms of indenture, while the age (and gender) of Africans was
rendered legally insignificant. The decision not to make a special legal provision for
African youth is an important element in what Hortense Spillers refers to as "the
dehumanizing, ungendering, and defacing project of African persons" that was integral to
the perpetuation of Atlantic slavery.
55
In colonial Virginia, childhood age was a racial
privilege.
The denial of African-American childhood was also carried out through
miscegenation laws which regulated the legal status of slave children. In practice,
Virginians had been enslaving the offspring of their slaves from as early as the 1640s.
But the hereditary nature of their slave system was not legally acknowledged until the
1660s. In 1662, the VA Assembly ruled:
47
Whereas some doubts have arisen whether children got by an Englishman
upon a negro woman should be slave or free, Be it therefore enacted and
declared by this present grand assembly, that all children born in this
country shall be bond or free only according to the condition of the
mother.
56

This statute broke with English custom and common law in important ways, and
illustrates well the "significant innovations in English traditions for marriage, family, and
parental authority" as Virginia law went about the business of creating and maintaining a
slave system.
57
Virginia's slave code racialized the colonial discourse of family
government in part by differentiating children and servants from slaves on the basis of
race. In this way, Kathleen Brown writes, "The project of defining English families as
Christian and white and privileging white patriarchs was intimately connected to the legal
denial of English-style families to the enslaved."
58
Within this system, the terms child,
servant, and slave were mutually exclusive and raced into the figures of the white child,
the white servant, and the black slave. As Fleetwood emphasized, children were not
slaves; by implication, slaves could not be children.
The English common law tradition dictated that a child's status was determined by
the status of his father; "family lineage and inheritance were traced patrilineally and
recognized as legal when reproduction took place within marriage."
59
In cases of
bastardy, the child lost legal claim to his/her father's name and wealth, but not his
nationality or religious affiliation. Though legally fatherless, the children born out of
wedlock to English men and women were considered both English and Christian. They
were frequently contracted into service, but they could not be enslaved or held in
servitude past the age of thirty-one.
60
The treatment of English children, whether born in
48
or out of marriage, essentially reflected the theory of paternity constructed by Locke in
his model of the social contract. Locke writes that when the child "comes to the estate
that made his father a freeman, the son is a freeman too." Locke implies, and later asserts,
that the son's freedom depends on his father's: "If such a state of reason, such an age of
discretion made [the father] free, the same shall make his son free too."
61

By contrast, the 1662 statute decrees that the child of a slave woman inherits the
condition of the mother, even when the child's father is an Englishman. This statute
created an invidious racialized distinction between the infants of servant women and the
infants of slave women even when the infants shared the same father. As Martinot writes,
this statute "establishes the principle that having a certain heritage, as measured or
evaluated according to specific statutory conditions, constituted either a form of
entitlement to property or disentitlement as property."
62
It determined that certain
children—those deemed non-English, non-Christian, and non-white—would be "slaves
by birth" (1667 statute) and permanently barred from civic belonging and participation,
destined never to be free of their chains. Birth to an enslaved woman cast young bodies
into a state of "kinlessness" which facilitated their (re)categorization as property.
63

The racial categorization of colonial infants was crucial to the reproduction of
slavery and racism. The automatic enslavement of infants born to enslaved women
worked to construct the different meanings attached to "white" and "black" people by the
end of the century. Martinot says the statute "engendered what was perhaps the most
severe disassociation between the English and the Africans," and "was an important step
toward the biologization of English/African difference."
64
Through the determination of
49
which infants born in the colonies would be slaves and which free, the VA Assembly
"constructed their own strictures of whiteness."
65
As Brown writes, "in the absence of
precise legal definitions of 'negro,' the offspring of African and English people threatened
to disturb the racial categories emerging in legal discourse and muddle their use in
everyday life." The ruling that infants born to enslaved women were black slaves,
regardless of their paternity or their pigmentation, helped to define what "black" meant in
the colonies. According to Brown, the law attempted "to naturalize the condition of
slavery by making it heritable and embedding it in a concept of race." A child born and
bred a slave became a representative symbol for whites indicating that people of African
descent were "inherently suited to slavery."
66

When Fleetwood exhorted parents not to treat their children "slavishly," he both
acknowledged and perpetuated the race-specificity of childhood in the colonies. By
contrasting childhood with slavery, Fleetwood constructed the categories of slave and
child as mutually defining and mutually exclusive. This construction also recognized and
ratified colonial practice. By the beginning of the eighteenth century when Fleetwood
published Relative Duties, the privileges of colonial childhood included legal status as a
Christian English person; the right to paternity; the right to labor under a contractual
agreement that stipulated basic education and training; putatively humane treatment;
access to redress in the courts for mistreatment; and—perhaps most significant—the right
to age into legal adulthood. Those bodies deemed "children" by the colonial elite were
born with the right to age out of the "chains" of childhood that required that they
sublimate their own will to the will of their guardians. As Fleetwood wrote: "And
50
Children have a great Duty; but they are not tied like Slaves in all Cases, and with Bonds
that will last for ever."
67
But enslaved children are "tied like Slaves." None of the
privileges of childhood were available to "black" infants and youth in Virginia after the
1660s. What little protection the Virginia Assembly offered to young people was
categorically reserved for "white" children.
Colonial childhood, like colonial servitude, was a raced status that existed in
contradistinction to the undifferentiated age of colonial slavehood. Fleetwood didn't say
as much, but when he referred to children in his sermons, he could only have meant free
white children. Slaves—regardless of age—had to be treated "slavishly" in order for the
colonial slave system to thrive. One of Fleetwood's most insistent concerns was that
"slavish" treatment would destroy children's will to become adults. Being subject to "too
great and constant Severities," according to Fleetwood, "discourages Children strangely,
and breaks their Spirits: they have no Heart to set about any thing; . . . they have no List
or Courage to go on." Severity squelches children's "Hope of Succeeding, that is the Life
and Spring of all Attempts; and when that fails, Desire itself languishes." Severity can
cause children to "give up all Endeavors for the Future." For Fleetwood, "Slavish"
treatment has the potential to turn children into slaves, making them "dread" their
parents, "as the Slaves do those that punish them."
68

Fleetwood implies that absolute parental severity achieves an attitude to life that
is appropriate for slaves, young and old, but not children. It is slaves who must give up all
desire to "go on," who must perceive their masters as "sharp, austere, untractable, and
never to be moved." In warning parents against "slavish" treatment of their children,
51
Fleetwood's text acknowledges that the purpose of slave management is precisely to
make young slaves despairingly accept their perpetual bondage. What differentiates the
child's bondage from the slave's (and slave child's) is both its mildness and its limited
duration. Or, to put it another way, what distinguishes childhood from slavery in a social
contract state is precisely that childhood prepares young people for civic adulthood, to be
subjects of the state (or the wives of subjects), while slavery habituates young people to a
life that excludes civic subjectivity, regardless of age or gender. "Slavish" treatment,
then, was treatment aimed at conditioning its object to accept absolute subordination.
Such treatment of free children implied that parental power was absolute and tyrannical,
an implication that Fleetwood, like Locke, soundly rejected. Children raised as slaves
could not possibly be prepared to consent to be governed when they reach the age of
discretion, since the purpose of effective slave management was to prevent civic and
legal maturation. Fleetwood's injunction that parents not raise their children like slaves
signaled the anxiety that parents might tyrannize their children. This anxiety may have
reflected the contemporary fear of unchecked power
69
, and/or it may have registered the
widespread cruelty of new world slavery. But it was certainly compounded by the social
contract's implicit pairing of children with slaves, and not with servants. Fleetwood drew
on Locke to claim that parental authority was mitigated by the divinely-ordained
inclination of parents to love their children.
Locke's Second Treatise is sensitive to the charge that absolute parental power
over children may appear to be a form of enslavement that is incompatible with a free
society. He defensively insists that, "The freedom of a man at years of discretion, and the
52
subjection of a child to his parents, whilst yet short of that age, are so consistent, and so
distinguishable, that the most blinded contenders for monarchy, by right of fatherhood,
cannot miss this difference."
70
Locke's evidence for this consistency between adults'
natural rights and children's unfreedom turns on his construction of a "natural" parental
desire to do what is best for their children. For Locke, parental authority over the child--
though not regulated by formal contract--is not onerous because the parental right to
discipline stems from the parental duty to nurture, and is tempered by the "natural"
parental concern for the child's best interests. Though parents have "the power of
commanding and chastising" their children, they naturally govern mildly and in their
children's best interests because, according to Locke,
God hath woven into the principles of human nature such a tenderness for
their off-spring, that there is little fear that parents should use their power
with too much rigour; the excess is seldom on the severe side, the strong
byass of nature drawing the other way.
71

Fleetwood echoes Locke's fiction of nature's "byass" when he enjoins parents not
to treat their children "slavishly." Fleetwood elaborates on the "Biass of Nature" that
keeps parents from abusing their authority. He writes that, "The Parental Yoke is,
naturally, of all others, the most light and easy." Fleetwood acknowledges that the law
allows parents tremendous latitude in the treatment of their children, but maintains that
parental authority is based "upon Presumption always, that it will tend to the Children's
Benefit." He acknowledges that not all parents treat their children as they should, but still
holds that the father-child relationship is the ideal model of an affectionate and nurturing
relationship, arguing that, "when we would set out the Care and Tenderness of one Man
53
to another, to the highest, we can go no farther than to say, he used him as a Father would
his Son."
72

Colonial Slave Conversion, Locke, and Theories of African-American Inferiority
Fleetwood's affiliation with the Anglican Society for the Propagation in Foreign Parts
meant that he was likely well-versed in colonial affairs, including the treatment of slaves
by their masters. He was chosen to deliver the annual SPG sermon in 1711, the same year
in which the SPG had been bequeathed two plantations in Barbados, complete with over
three hundred slaves.
73
In the 1711 sermon, Fleetwood essentially adhered to the SPG's
party line on colonial slavery.
74
Throughout the eighteenth century, the SPG held that
American slavery was consistent with church doctrine, as long as masters allowed their
slaves to become Christians, to be "instructed in the Faith of Christ, and brought to
Baptism," as Fleetwood put it. Fleetwood did not deny that African slaves were human.
He characterized them as "equally the Workmanship of God [as their masters]; endued
with the same Faculties, and intellectual Powers; Bodies of the same Flesh and Blood,
and Souls as certainly immortal." But he did deny that the conversion to Christianity
demanded and enabled by their humanity should result in their freedom from slavery.
75

In his sermon before the elite members of the SPG, Fleetwood strongly refuted
the widely held belief that Christians should not enslave other Christians. Rather, he
argued, "Slaves are not more at Liberty after they are Baptized, than they were before."
76

Fleetwood earnestly sought to mitigate the egalitarian message of the New Testament. He
considered the notion that Christianizing slaves mandated their release from bondage "a
certain Mistake" that derived from a misreading of the New Testament. When St. Paul
54
preached the gospel of "Christian Liberty," according to Fleetwood, he meant spiritual,
not temporal, "Liberty." St. Paul was referring to "Freedom from their Sins, [and]
Freedom from the Fears of Death, and everlasting Misery." He was not referring to
freedom "from any State of Life, in which they had either voluntarily engaged
themselves, or were fallen into through Misfortune." As evidence, Fleetwood cited I Cor
7:20: "Let every Man abide in the same Calling, wherein he was called." He followed the
citation with his own Pauline injunction concerning slaves in the colonies:
Let every Man know, that his being called to the Faith of Christ, does not
exempt him from continuing in the same State of Life he was before; it
makes no alteration of his Condition in this World; the Liberty of
Christianity is entirely Spiritual. . . . In a Word, the Law of Christ made no
changes of this Nature, but left Men under all the Obligations and
Engagements that it found them with respect to Liberty or Bondage.
77

Fleetwood's SPG sermon demonstrates the rhetorical maneuvers necessary to
accommodate Anglican doctrine to the exigencies of colonial slavery at a time when the
SPG itself and many of its patrons increasingly owed their wealth to the slave trade and
slave labor.
78
Many slave owners and investors resisted the SPG's attempts to convert
slaves for fear that such conversion would somehow undermine the profitability of
slavery. Those benefiting from colonial slavery feared that once Christianized, slaves
would be seen as more deserving of temporal freedom, better working conditions, and
other social privileges. Fleetwood reassured his audience that Christianity no longer
conferred "Advantages or Privileges" on its subjects. There was no longer any inherent
contradiction between being Christian and being enslaved by Christians. Rather, freedom
55
from slavery depended on nationality, not religious affiliation. "[W]hatever Liberties the
Laws indulge to us, they do it to us as English-Men, and not as Christians."
79

Regardless of the SPG message, however, the British colonial impulse to
Christianize Africans conflicted with the desire to keep them enslaved. Based on
tradition, many colonists believed that Christians could not enslave other Christians.
80
As
early as 1641, colonists in Massachusetts attempted to resolve this conflict through
legislation. Article 91 of "The Liberties of the Massachusets Collonie in New England"
both asserts the legality of "bond slaverie" under certain circumstances, and stipulates
that the "Christian usages" due slaves do not liberate them from their enslavement.
81

However, this law did not fully resolve the problem. Rather, it exposed a fundamental
contradiction in the British empire's logic of conversion with regard to slaves. Colonists
justified their enslavement of Africans in part by emphasizing Africans' "heathen"
customs. From this standpoint, enslavement rescued Africans from eternal damnation.
However, once they had been rescued, what rationale remained for keeping them
enslaved? Conversion essentially corrected the inadequacy that legitimized the
enslavement in the first place. As A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. writes, "Once the Africans
began to accept the Christian God, it became impossible to insist on their inferiority
based on the idea that they did not know God." Thus, the religious salvation justification
"challenged the precept of inferiority itself." More than mere law was required to cope
with this challenge. As Higginbotham argues, for pro-slavery colonists, "it became
necessary to reinvent [Africans'] inferiority" in order to justify their continued
enslavement.
82

56
In this section, I argue that the writings of Puritan minister Cotton Mather on slave
conversion facilitated the accommodation of Christianity to new world slavery that was
crucial to the success of the slave system in the colonies.
83
The colonial reinvention of
African inferiority that emerged in the early eighteenth century turned on Enlightenment
epistemologies undergirding the invention of the modern child that became available to
colonists in 1690 when John Locke published An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding. Specifically, Mather's catechism for slaves, The Negro Christianized
(1706), deployed Lockean theories of children's limited reasoning faculties to
characterize all Africans and their descendants, regardless of age, as intellectually inferior
to whites. The result was a catechistical philosophy that granted slaves a reasoning ability
sufficient for conversion to Christianity, but insufficient for civil liberty. In Mather's
sermons and in his household, only white children had the potential to become fully
reasoning adults. While Mather's promotion of slave conversion drew from the narrative
strategies of previous writers, including Richard Baxter, George Fox, and Morgan
Godwyn, he added a claim of "Negro" inferiority that his predecessors neither posited,
nor, in all likelihood, could have imagined in the pre-Lockean discursive context in
which they wrote. By cementing the analogy between the "Negro's" and the child's
mental abilities, Mather's rhetorical innovation established the groundwork for American
Enlightenment theories of racial difference, such as the one propounded in Thomas
Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia.
Despite the significant role played by Mather's The Negro Christianized in the
history of racial formation, the catechism has garnered relatively little scholarly attention.
57
The two exceptions to this scholarly neglect, however, are forceful and impressive. For
Dana D. Nelson, The Negro Christianized illustrates the political and economic forces at
work in all early American racial ideologies, and the extent to which discursive context
shapes the author's rhetorical choices and messages. She argues that Mather was a
"progressive" thinker when it came to racial issues, and that he fits Albert Memmi's
characterization of the colonist who resists dominant racial prejudice. According to
Nelson, Mather "overtly works to break down racial tropes," including the contemporary
racist beliefs "that blacks do not have rational capacity and that dark skin color is an
external manifestation of moral degradation." At the same time, Nelson insists that
Mather's colonial privilege as a white male slaveholder compromises his resistance,
instantiating a "covert" conservatism that thwarts his "good intentions." Thus, Mather's
imagery of dark and light "reinforces rather than undermines a persistent conceptual link
between skin color and moral degradation," and his own pecuniary interest in the
enslavement of Africans causes his text to perpetuate the hierarchization of white souls
over "Negro" souls. Nelson concludes that "Mather's text explicitly sponsors a liberal,
humane reading of blackness while implicitly proposing a very conservative,
commodified figuration," and suggests that readers of The Negro Christianized recognize
both the text's "social good" and its "fundamental prejudice and self-interest."
84

In another recent article on Mather's sermons concerning slavery, Elisabeth Ceppi
takes a much less sanguine view than Nelson of the Massachusetts minister's good
intentions with regard to challenging racial prejudice. In the context of a complex
argument about the way in which Mather's "racialization of servitude marks a crucial step
58
in the separation of labor from the family as an institution, and thus in the transition from
feudalism to capitalism," Ceppi indites Mather for explicitly cementing the emergent
equation between sinfulness, blackness and slavery. In Ceppi's view, Mather's text shores
up the colonial distinction between white servant and black slave that attributes to
English laborers the potential and the ability eventually to become masters themselves
over others, while it consigns African laborers to perpetual servitude and subordination.
In Mather's sermon, "'whiteness' signifies the properly internalized impulse to labor while
'blackness' signifies a perpetual need for external compulsion." Mather deploys the
existing stigmatization of black skin to accommodate rhetorically the enslavement of
Africans to the Puritan spiritual order, "to reconcile the spiritual dimension of family
government with the reality of African servants."
85
Unlike Nelson, Ceppi does not
celebrate Mather's "open-mindedness," nor does she cast him as an unwitting victim of
his privilege or his times.
My analysis of The Negro Christianized has more in common with Ceppi's than
with Nelson's in that I regard Mather's racism against Africans as both overt and
intentional. I support this analysis by reading Mather's catechism for slaves in the context
of contemporary rhetoric promoting the conversion of slaves in the colonies, as well as in
comparison to Mather's several catechisms for white children. While both Nelson and
Ceppi acknowledge that Mather's racial thinking is innovative rather than simply
imitative, I foreground this claim by illustrating the nature of Mather's intervention into
existing discourses of racial difference. In particular, I show how Mather rejects emergent
religious justifications for the colonial kidnapping and enslavement of Africans, in order
59
to position himself as an enlightenment thinker whose declarations of African inferiority
represent the cutting edge of modern science, a move that is in line with his membership
in the Boston Philosophical Society established by his father, Increase Mather, in 1683;
his later acceptance of membership in the Royal Society of London; and his participation
in trans-Atlantic correspondence concerning philosophy and the "new science" of the late
seventeenth- and early eighteenth-centuries. As a result of my extended contextualization
of Mather's 1706 sermon, I can identify several specific ways in which Mather's
configuration of racial difference deployed Lockean epistemology, and shaped American
racial discourse into the late eighteenth-century and beyond.
Cotton Mather's The Negro Christianized (1706) and the Negro/Child Analogy
In the decades leading up to the Civil War, the most pervasive defense of slavery turned
on the analogy between slaves and children. Scholars generally characterize the slave-
child analogy defense as a product of late eighteenth-century writings that attempted to
reconcile slavery with the Lockean democratic ideals of British colonial revolutionaries.
86

According to Holly Brewer, Thomas Jefferson made the argument that African-
Americans were like "perpetual children" as a strategy to justify the inequality of some
adults "within a new theory of equality" that claimed every man's universal right to self-
government. In this view, Jefferson compared slaves to children because "children were
the one group explicitly and consistently excluded from equality by Revolutionary
ideology." That is to say, Jefferson extended the Lockean view that children lacked
sufficient reason to consent to government to apply to "Negroes" of all ages. This
strategy resulted in influential cultural theories of the "Negro's" inherent and permanent
60
intellectual inferiority. Brewer denies that Locke himself supported slavery. Rather, she
writes, "For those who sought to legitimize slavery under democratic-republican theory,
[Locke's] justification of temporal authority over children provided a means to do so that
Locke did not in fact himself take: by comparing people to children." For Brewer, the
entrenchment of the slave-child analogy took place relatively long after Locke's Second
Treatise (1690) had been published and new world slavery established; the analogy
required the conflict between the revolutionary ideals of the founding fathers and their
commitment to slavery to become a significant force in pro-slavery rhetoric.
87

My reading of Mather's The Negro Christianized suggests that the slave-child
analogy has roots in the early eighteenth century, and that, in addition to Locke's political
philosophy, his late seventeenth-century epistemological theory, outlined in the Essay
Concerning Human Understanding (1690), played a crucial role in the formation and
enduring influence of the analogy. While Locke's intentions remain ambiguous, his Essay
provided Mather with the conceptual framework and language to link the reasoning
ability of Africans and their descendants with that of (white) children.
88
By the first
decade of the eighteenth century, Mather had combined the patriarchal dictate that one's
slaves are like one's children in terms of their status within the family, with the
epistemological argument that African Americans, regardless of age, reason at the same
level as young (white) children.
Mather makes his theory of African-American intellectual inferiority and his
indebtedness to Locke evident in The Way of Truth (1708), a collection of short
catechisms designed for all dependents. In it, Mather repeats the patriarchal position that
61
servants and slaves are like children to their masters. He writes: "And the Masters must
also be Put in mind, that the Servants in the Family are their Children. The Servants also
must be catechized."
89
Mather's exhortation to masters to catechize all their "children,"
including their servants, occurs in a prefatory essay entitled, "The Man of God
Furnished." This title is an explicit reference to Locke's metaphor in the Essay for the
way in which a child's mind acquires knowledge. In expounding his theory that the mind
receives all knowledge from sensation, Locke configures the mind as an "empty cabinet"
that is progressively "furnished" by experience.
90
Mather clearly intended The Way of
Truth to provide the "furniture" that would fill the minds of the young and dependent in
Massachusetts. He writes in, "The Man of God Furnished," that catechizing "is very
Necessary, and highly Agreeable to . . . Enlighten the Understanding of the
Catechumens."
91
Mather's prefatory essay is immediately followed by two short
catechisms with instructions that define both children and slaves as people with limited
"capacity" to reason. The first catechism is an abridged version of "Milk for Babes," the
famous catechism for English children written by Mather's grandfather, John Cotton, in
1646. Mather describes his abridgement as, "A Little Shorten'd, and Suited for the
Lowest Capacities."
92
It contains fifty-seven questions followed by short answers. The
second catechism following the prefatory essay is less than a page and consists of only
three questions and answers. It is described as, "A very Short CATECHISM; To Begin
with Negro's, and others like them, of the Dullest and Lowest Capacity."
93
The Way of
Truth promotes a racialized hierarchy of reasoning "capacity" that equates "Negroes" of
all ages with very young children.
62
Mather's characterization of African-American intellect as not only "low," but
"dull," suggests that he was concerned about the conflation between white children and
slaves inherent in the slave-child analogy. In Bonifacius (Essays to Do Good) (1710),
Mather indicates his concern by emphasizing the limitations of the analogy. After
expressing his hope, "That the poor Slaves and Blacks, which Live with us, may by our
means be made the Candidates of the Heavenly Life," Mather argues that the first
"Resolution" of a master regarding his servants should be: "I would always Remember,
that my Servants are in some sort my Children," and "I would make them as my
Children."
94
As the qualifications "in some sort" and "as" indicate, Mather both
acknowledged the validity of the slave-child analogy and sought to maintain a distinction
between the two terms. For Mather, Negroes were children to a certain extent, but they
were also clearly not children in important ways, particularly in the sense that their child-
like capacity was a permanent trait, not something out of which they would age.
95
The
racialization of the analogy (black slaves = white children) warded off the threat of a
complete identification between the two terms, a collapse that had the dangerous
potential to extend the possibility of adulthood to slaves and to equate the status of
childhood with slavery.
In his 1696 collections of sermons, A Good Master Well Served, Mather
acknowledges and ratifies the perpetual slave status of Africans. In the sermon, he
addresses the "several sorts of Servants now together in this Congregation":
Some of you, are under the Yoke of Servitude by a perpetual Vassalage, to
those who have by Sword or Price purchased a Dominion over you. Others
of you are under the Yoke of Servitude, by a Temporary Agreement, which
63
you have made with some, to be subject unto them for a while upon such
and such Considerations.
96

The racialization of this division between temporary servitude and perpetual slavery
occurs explicitly at the end of the sermon when Mather addresses the two types of
servants separately. First, he exhorts "every Prentice" and "every Handmaid" in the
audience to be good servants. He reminds the "Lads" that "Seven years will not last
alwayes" and promises that "when your Time is out, it is likely that God will multiply his
Blessings upon you; Men will Respect you, Employ you, Value you." Mather encourages
the "Maids," to "so busily, so thriftily manage the Things committed unto you," that their
masters "have cause to count you their Children, rather than their Servants."
97
The
whiteness of the "lads" and "maids" is made evident by Mather's subsequent address to
"the Scores of Slaves, the poor Blacks, now also in this Assembly." For this segment of
the audience, Mather dispenses with references to gender divisions, stages of life, or an
earthly status beyond servitude. Rather, he directs "Blacks" to be content with and
grateful for their perpetual bondage. He writes:
But the most of you, have so little cause to desire your being any other
than Slaves as you are, & whose you are, that it would soon make you
miserable to be otherwise. You are better Fed & better Clothed, & better
Managed by far, than you would be, if you were your Own men.
98

In A Negro Christianized, Mather first developed the racialized hierarchy of
intellect that would later be used by Jefferson and others to rationalize the slave's
permanent subordination to a master. He attributed to "Negro-Servants" the intellectual
capacity of white children, but he denied them the potential to develop into fully-
64
reasoning adults. In this way, Mather provided a justification for their perpetual servitude
that could withstand the catechism and conversion he promoted. Like white children,
slaves were to be educated in the rudiments of Christian theology. However, this
education could not provide an eventual rationale for self-government as it did for grown
white children, because African-Americans were unable, according to Mather, to
significantly alter their "dull" and "low" reasoning levels. As A Negro Christianized
suggests, "Negroes" can have a "smaller" or "bigger" "capacity" to reason, but this
"capacity" is not correlated with age, and does not naturally increase with age, as it is and
does for white children and servants. Mather makes this point implicitly when he
counsels busy masters to enlist their children and white servants—but not their black
servants—in the religious instruction of their "Negroes."
99

Pre-Lockean Concepts of Slave Conversion
Mather's arguments in favor of the Christianization of slaves were similar in many
ways to those of his predecessors. The Negro Christianized is a forty-six-page published
sermon whose subtitle states its purpose: "An Essay to Excite and Assist that Good Work,
the Instruction of Negro-Servants in Christianity." The first twenty-eight pages "excite"
readers by presenting four arguments for the conversion of slaves and by anticipating two
arguments against conversion. The remainder of the sermon "assists" readers with
practical suggestions, catechisms, and prayers designed specifically for "Negroes." The
Negro Christianized echoes many of the claims made in the popular 1680 pamphlet
authored by Morgan Godwyn, entitled, The Negro's and Indians Advocate, Suing for
their Admission into the Church: Or, A Persuasive to the Instructing and Baptizing of the
65
Negro's and Indians in our Plantations. Like Godwyn, Mather insists that God wants
masters to Christianize their slaves; that those who do not convert their slaves are not true
Christians; that masters owe it to their slaves to make them eligible for eternal salvation;
and that Christianizing slaves will benefit both the slaves and their masters in
innumerable ways. And like Godwyn, Mather reassures slave owners that converting
slaves to Christianity will neither make them free, nor less tractable.
100

Like Godwyn's claims for slave conversion, Mather's are premised on the
understanding that "Negroes" are human, reflecting a monogenetic view of humanity.
Given "That God hath made of one Blood, all Nations of men," Africans are both
"Brothers" and "Neighbors" of slave owners.
101
Mather counters the belief, prevalent
particularly in the British West Indies and southern British colonies in North America,
that Africans are not members of the human species. He writes that "Negroes" are "Men,
and not Beasts," and "they must be used accordingly." Mather rejects the idea that
Africans' dark "Complexion" causes them to be less favored in God's eyes. In addition, he
makes the point that Africans have "Rational Souls," and that their "Reason showes it self
in the Design which they daily act upon."
102
But unlike Godwyn, Mather suggests that
Africans are somehow mentally inferior to Europeans. He writes that "their Stupidity is a
Discouragement," and he acknowledges that, "It may seem, unto as little purpose, to
Teach as to wash an Aethiopian."
103
Mather's view that slaves are especially difficult to
educate is underscored by his inclusion in The Negro Christianized of very short
catechisms and a paraphrase of the Lord's prayer "brought down unto some of their
Capacities."
104

66
Certainly, the fact that many Massachusetts slaves were unaccustomed to the
English language and customs may have led colonists to believe that Africans were less
intelligent as a group than Europeans. Winthrop Jordan argues that, "The cultural gulf
between the two peoples was enormous, and Negroes fresh from Africa and even their
children must have seemed very stupid indeed." According to Jordan, this tendency of
English colonists to regard the African slave as "a naturally stupid brute" was exacerbated
"because there existed no clear demarcation between inborn and acquired characteristics."
In other words, though Mather could recognize that colonial slaves did not have access to
the education that colonial whites did, he might still believe that "Negro stupidity" was
"hopelessly rooted in his essential character." Jordan argues that colonists could easily
"slip into thinking that the Negro's natural and inveterate stupidity was 'innate,' without,
however, imparting much precision or meaning to the notion."
105
For Jordan, the early
eighteenth century colonial impulse to regard Africans as intellectually inferior was the
same kind of "unthinking decision" as the enslavement of Africans itself.
106
However,
comparing Mather's The Negro Christianized to Godwyn's The Negro's and Indians
Advocate is instructive with regard to understanding Mather's thinking about African
intelligence; the comparison suggests that Mather consciously embraced and perpetuated
the notion that Africans as a group had, like European children, less reasoning "capacity"
than European adults.
Godwyn devotes much more attention to the question of slave "stupidity" than
Mather. Godwyn acknowledges that the inability of African slaves to speak English can
be an obstacle to their religious conversion. However, he points out that "many
67
thousands" of the slaves in Barbados have mastered the English language; they have
"arrived to an ability of Understanding, and discoursing in English equal with most of our
own People."
107
In his response to the argument that the "Negro's Stupidity" and
"barbarousness of their Manners," makes conversion impossible, Godwyn suggests that
the English have essentially misunderstood African behaviors. For example, the English
regard African dancing as a form of "Idolatry" when it is, in fact, a religious custom
enacted to "procure Rain."
108
In other words, Godwyn makes the point that African
difference does not necessarily connote innate inferiority. He attributes any lack in
Africans' "Civil Conversation and outward Demeanour" to their environment, not their
nature. The "cause of their Ignorance" is "the want of Converse and Education," a plight
that "may also befal . . . the Inhabitants of our Mother Country." Godwyn underscores his
belief in the innate equality of Europeans and Africans by pointing out that some English
colonists exhibit less "Knowledg," "Piety," and "Civility" than many slaves.
109

Mather had clearly read Godwyn's plea for slave conversion before writing his own,
but he did not attempt to convince his readers that Africans could be equal to whites in
terms of knowledge or piety. Instead he hammered home the idea that "Negroes" as a
group had chronically "lower capacities" for reasoning than whites, regardless of their
environment or education. For Godwyn, inclusion in the human species necessarily
meant equality with all other humans in terms of the ability to reason and to acquire
knowledge. He seems not to have considered that different groups of humans could have
different intellectual abilities. How could Mather come to this conclusion? I contend that
what Mather had that Godwyn did not was exposure to the epistemological theories of
68
John Locke.
Godwyn's Advocate (1680), Locke's Essay (1690), and Mather's Negro
Christianized (1706) all thematize the human/animal divide in general, and the
relationship of the "Negro" to the human in particular, yet their approaches are
significantly different from each other. For Godwyn, Africans are humans without
qualification. He attributes the "Fiction" that "the Negro's, though in their Figure they
carry some resemblances of Manhood, yet are indeed no Men" to the "Sloth and Avarice"
of slave owners who seek to avoid converting their slaves. For Godwyn, the primary
difference between men and animals has to do with the capacity for and the right to
religion.
110
As a member of the human species, the "Negro" has both the capacity and the
right. Godwyn emphasizes the equality of all the members of the human species.
111
For
Godwyn, what distinguishes man from nonhuman animals is his "Rational Soul."
112

Godwyn unequivocally determines that Africans are men with rational souls. He
proves their humanity by attributing to them all the primary physical qualities of humans.
The "consideration of the shape and figure of our Negro's Bodies, their Limbs and
Members; their Voice and Countenance, in all things according with other Mens; together
with their Risibility and Discourse (Man's peculiar Faculties)" is "sufficient conviction"
that they are "truly Men." Their humanity is also supported by their participation in trade,
in management (e.g. as overseers of other slaves), and in "other no less Manly
imployments; as also of Reading and Writing." For Godwyn, all of these activities prove
"Negro" humanity; they are "clear emanations and results of Reason, and therefore the
most genuine and perfect characters of Homoniety." To drive home his point, Godwyn
69
underscores the absurdity of slave owners' claims to "Negro brutality" when they employ
some of their slaves to govern other slaves. He writes: "It would certainly be a pretty kind
of Comical Frenzie, to imploy Cattel about Business, and to constitute them Lieutenants,
Overseers, and Governours."
113

Godwyn strongly rejects the claim that the African's "Complexion" diminishes his
claim to humanity, or "Brutifies" him.
114
Rather, dark pigmentation reflects nothing more
than climate. "Nor is our Negro's blackness . . . occasioned by any other means, than the
Climate they live under."
115
Godwyn argues that skin color is therefore wholly unrelated
to the "inner Man." As proof, he argues that English people who relocate to tropical
climates, themselves become darker-skinned, and their "Off-spring, after the Succession
of some few Ages, may, (judging by what is already visible of many of them) become
quite Black, at least very Duskie and Brown." He warns his readers that the opinion that
dark skin signals inhumanity might one day be turned against the English and their
descendants who reside permanently in the British colonies, since they will likely lose
their whiteness in time.
116
By means of threats like these, Godwyn attempts to separate
the question of skin color from the question of humanity, and to stifle the suggestion that
there can be "degrees" of humanity. He insists that "the meanest Slave hath a Soul of no
less value,"
117
and he roundly condemns slave owners who regard "their Mulatto's . . .
whose Parents on the one side are English, or of the White sort" as "a less degree
removed from Men" than "such as are wholly the Off-spring of Negro's."
118

In contrast, Mather embraces the notion that members of the human species can
be more or less human. On the second page of his essay, Mather characterizes "these
70
Wretched Negroes" enslaved in Massachusetts as "the most Bruitish of Creatures upon
Earth."
119
While exhorting his readers to Christianize their "Negroes," he writes that
"They are more nearly Related unto us, than many others are."
120
Like Godwyn, Mather
dismisses the argument that Africans are the cursed descendants of Ham, and like
Godwyn, he attributes their darker pigmentation to climate. However, Mather doesn't
suggest either that Africans can become lighter-skinned or that English can become
darker-skinned. He associates darker skin with increased distance from religion and
understanding. For Mather, the sun not only darkens the skin, but also injures the mind.
Thus, he proposes to his readers: "Let us make a Trial, Whether they that have been
Scorched and Blacken'd by the Sun of Africa, may not come to have their Minds Healed
by the more Benign Beams of the Sun of Righteousness."
121
Unlike Godwyn, Mather
considers skin color to be related to the "inner Man." He strongly suggests that there is a
correlation between skin color and degree of humanity. He propounds the view that
"Negroes" are human, but less human than "white" Europeans.
Locke's Essay and Slave Conversion Theory
The differences between Mather's and Godwyn's arguments about the "Negro's"
humanity reflect late seventeenth-century shifts in the discourse of the human
popularized and perpetuated by John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
While scholars disagree about Locke's own views concerning African humanity, they
agree that his theory of human understanding facilitated the ranking of human groups by
rational capacity that undergirded the Enlightenment's invention of a hierarchical
classification of "races." Cotton Mather's adaptation of Lockean epistemology suggests
71
that Locke's child figure also played a crucial role in laying the groundwork for the
eighteenth-century science of human "varieties." Locke's Essay reinvigorated and raced
the Aristotelian triad of the civilized child, the savage adult, and the animal. This triad
secured the analogy between the white child and the adult "Negro" by positioning them
both on the border between the human and the animal in terms of their capacity to reason.
The difference between the English child and the African man is maintained by an
invidious racial distinction grounded in pigmentation that attributes full humanity to the
white child even though he is not yet fully reasonable, while attributing partial humanity
to the black man regardless of the amount of reason he displays.
As Winthrop Jordan and others have shown, Locke's Essay marks an important
moment in the secularization of Western culture: the transition from a primary focus on
man's "spiritual condition" to a dominant interest in "the place of man in an ordered
creation of natural beings."
122
As part of this transition, "the concept of intelligence . . .
[became] disassociated from the idea of capacity for religious experience."
123
This
separation of the study of man from an overtly religious worldview enacted by Locke's
Essay made the emerging field of the natural history of man, and the associated rise of
racial classification, possible by allowing the gradation of human beings.
124
Before
Locke, as Godwyn's Advocate attests, the human-animal divide turned on whether or not
a being had a rational soul that could worship God. One either was or was not human.
Charles H. Lyons writes that as long as the soul was the definitive criterion of humanity,
"there could be no grading: a being either had one and was consequently a man, or did
not have one and was therefore a beast."
125
The separation of mental capacity from the
72
capacity for religion removed the main ideological obstacle to classifying peoples along a
continuum of humanity.
Locke's shaping of this continuum was tremendously influential. By
simultaneously deploying the Chain of Being to understand man's relationship to the
animal, destabilizing the boundaries of the human species, and identifying higher mental
capacity as the distinguishing trait of the human, Locke paved the way for a Chain of
Reason. As Lyons writes, "it can be inferred from [Locke's] position that, as brutes have
some powers of reason and humans still more, organisms could be arranged in a
hierarchy according to the amount of reason they possess."
126
At the same time, Locke's
empiricism and his strong association between "white" skin and high humanity
established a "Chain of Color,"
127
in which reasoning capacity correlated with skin color
on a white-black spectrum. This framework positioned the "black" "Negro" as the
humanoid with the lowest rational capacity, and the closest affinity to the non-human
animal.
The chronological coincidence between Locke's Essay and the institutionalization
of slavery in the British colonies raises the question of how slavery influenced English
theorizations of child development. Certainly, the Aristotelian triad rendered the white
English child and the adult "Negro" mutually constitutive. The various social forces that
promoted a conception of children as categorically incapable of reasoning at an "adult"
level combined with the forces unleashed by the slave trade that asserted a conception of
the "Negro" as categorically incapable of reasoning at a European level. The
dehumanization of the child reinforced the dehumanization of the "Negro" and vice versa.
73
The more entrenched the "Negro"-child analogy became, the more unlikely it was that
either white children or black adults could be seen as reasonable creatures capable of self-
government.
Like the African, the white child lost social status and reasoning capacity in the
English-speaking world over the course of the seventeenth century. Holly Brewer has
traced the way in which Anglo-American legal assumptions about children's authority
shifted during this period, from full recognition for elite children through the fifteenth
century to no recognition for children of any class by the beginning of the nineteenth
century. Before the shift, elite children "could be on juries and in parliament and could
manage estates." Young children of the highly ranked "could testify, offer judgment, and
have a civil identity." The young of the poor, even four-year-olds, could sign their own
labor contracts. An infant prince could be crowned King of England. By the late
eighteenth century, children of all classes had lost ground in the legal arena. Young
people could no longer "legally make informed decisions—could not be held responsible
for their actions and had no right to offer legitimate consent and to exercise authority
over others." Age now trumped rank.
128

The transformation of children's legal status derived legitimacy from the
Enlightenment proposition that all children—due to their youth—lacked the rational
capacity to consent. Brewer writes that "Modern childhood is a by-product of the Age of
Reason, which designated children as those without reason."
129
Social contract theorists,
most notably Locke, redefined childhood as the state of not having sufficient reason to
consent to government in order to strengthen the claim that adult male property-owners,
74
in contrast, had such a capacity. Children were redefined as lacking reason to bolster
reformist claims that certain adults had the necessary reason to participate in government.
Excluding children from consent legitimated adult consent by contrasting it with the
theorized inauthenticity and illegitimacy of youthful opinions. Thus political forces
emphasized children's innate intellectual inferiority to adults at exactly the moment when
there arose a demand for theorizations of the "Negro's" innate intellectual inferiority to
the European due to the spread of slavery in the New World.
130

The early modern "discovery" of children's mental inferiority happened in part
through the proliferation of pedagogical strategies for catechizing the illiterate, the less
educated, and the poor, and it involved a transformation in the narrative representation of
children's mental development. A catechism is a text used for instruction in the
fundamental principles of the Christian religion by way of question and answer.
131

Several hundred catechisms were composed in England between the Reformation and the
early eighteenth century.
132
The impulse to catechize all members of the church grew out
of the competition between Protestants and papists in the fifteenth century. Protestants
sought a way to inculcate Protestantism in the young and the "simple." In 1617, John
Symes called the question and answer form, "the most profitable way for the simpler sort
of people" to learn the basics of the faith.
133
Catechisms conflated children with all
"simple" adults to the point that when the word "babe" appeared in a catechism's title, it
"referred to the uninstructed generally, not merely to children." Gillian Avery writes that
before the late seventeenth century, "children were regarded as different from adults only
in that they had lower capacities."
134
In other words, before Locke, educators recognized
75
a difference between children and (some) adults, but this difference had not yet been
theorized or narrated.
By examining two texts of Cotton Mather's whose dates span the publication of
Locke's Essay, we can see how the development of a sophisticated narrative of children's
intellectual difference hardened the analogy between Africans and children. Certainly, the
analogy between the slave and the child was implicit in the discourse of household
government, including catechisms. All household dependents ("Inferiors," as Mather
called them), including children, servants, and slaves, shared a lowly socio-political
status. On one level, all Cotton Mather had to do to equate the mental capacity of his
slaves with his children was to extend the category of the "simple" to include "Negroes."
But the emphasis on a shared lowly rational capacity strengthened the analogy by
anchoring it in the body and in the emergent racialized Enlightenment discourse about the
nature of man. As Winthrop Jordan argues, the Chain of Reason grew in strength as an
explanatory framework as traditional rationalizations for hierarchical social relations lost
ground.
135

Transformations of the Negro/Child Analogy in Mather
By 1689, Mather had begun the rhetorical work of associating the "Negro" with the child.
In Small Offers: Towards the Service of the Tabernacle in the Wilderness, Mather
dedicates a section to refuting the excuses that heads of households give for not
converting their dependents. The first two excuses appear on facing pages in analogous
formats. The first considers the excuse that, "The Inferiors in my Family are very Dull,"
and the second considers the excuse that, "The Inferiors in my Family are very Young."
76
However, their contents are quite different. The first counsels masters to "stoop" to his
slaves' "Capacities," however much the slaves "are dull in their Intellectuals." The second
counsels masters that it is never too early to begin catechizing their children.
136
In this
two-page passage, Mather does not use the term "capacity" in reference to children, nor
does he make any references to their ability to learn. Rather, he reiterates the well-known
religious proverb, "Train up a Child in the way he should go," and then a variation on the
proverb using the metaphor of the child as a vessel for liquid: "Let the first liquor that is
put into them be sweet and good; and they will keep the tang of it all their dayes." The
vessel metaphor corresponds with the use of "capacity" to mean volume of liquid that can
be contained, and the popular early modern impulse to compare children to containers
that generally hold less than adults.
Locke popularized the metaphor of the child as a piece of paper, a surface on
which culture is inscribed, rather than a bottle in which it is poured. This rhetorical
transformation reflected in part the spread of cultural literacy in the period via the cheap
reading materials made available by the increased use of the printing press. In the Essay,
Locke writes: "For such, who are careful (as they call it) to principle children well, . . .
instil into the unwary, and as yet unprejudiced, understanding, (for white paper receives
any characters,) those doctrines they would have them retain and profess."
137
Locke
replaces the metaphor of the child as porous vessel absorbing the taste of its contents with
the child as piece of paper being imprinted with inked characters, being written upon
rather than filled. Locke's children have "understandings" that can be inscribed like slates
and "furnished" like "cabinets," but that cannot simply have something "put into them."
77
By 1713, we can see how reading Locke and writing The Negro Christianized had
transformed Mather's language. In The A, B, C of Religion, subtitled, Lessons Relating to
the Fear of God, Fitted unto the Youngest & Lowest Capacities, and Children Suitably
instructed in the Maxims of Religion, Mather has completely integrated the slave-child
analogy by adapting the language of "capacity" to refer to the mental abilities of both
slaves and white children, and thus to categorize them as members of the same group.
Mather uses the word "Capacities" myriad times in the short collection of "Lessons,"
itself an indicator of the influence of Locke. Jordan writes that, "it was owing chiefly to
Locke that the most popular term for describing mental talents had become
"capacities.'"
138
Each new exhortation begins with a variation on the phrase, "They that
are of the Lowest Capacity may be taught thus much . . . ."
139

Mather uses the adjectives
"lowest," "weakest," and "dullest" interchangeably to modify "capacity," registering the
increased complexity of the term when used to describe mental ability. Mather suggests
that all members of his congregation have different "capacities" for instruction, but that
children and "Negroes" have categorically "low" capacities. As is true for Small Offers,
one of the main messages of The A, B, C of Religion is that even small children are
capable of religious instruction. However, Mather has now engaged a language of the
"Understanding" to talk about children's "Capacities."
140
At one point in The A, B, C of
Religion, Mather writes: "And, Children, You are not of such a Low Capacity, that you
can't form such Thoughts as these,"
141
a phrase that references the expression "forming
letters," or the act of writing. Mather's text makes it clear that children do become
"Suitably instructed" eventually, while he makes no such suggestion about "Negroes." In
78
Mather's text, the appellation, "They that are not got beyond the Capacity of Children,"
operates as a metaphor for the limited intellectual potential that the racialized rhetoric of
"capacity" institutes for Africans.
In the fourteen years between Small Offers (1689) and The A, B, C of Religion
(1713), Massachusetts colonists faced increasing pressure to rationalize their enslavement
of Africans. In 1696, the British Parliament suspended the monopoly of the Royal
African Company and the slave trade expanded dramatically. The increase in the number
of enslaved in Boston and other towns "brought slavery and related issues to the forefront
of public concern."
142
The hardening of the division between indentured servants and
slaves along raced lines at the end of the seventeenth century provoked racist
explanations for the increasing social and legal subordination of Africans. According to
Albert J. Von Frank, "suddenly a fund of racist ideology was needed to smooth the
transition."
143
In this essay, I have argued that Cotton Mather promoted a theory of the
"Negro's" inferior rational capacity in order to be able to promote slave conversion
without undermining the institution of slavery. Mather's cementing of the emergent
Enlightenment analogy between "Negroes" and children through sermons and catechistic
discourse proved to be an effective and enduring rhetorical solution to the peculiar and
pressing colonial problem of rationalizing the enslavement of Christianized Africans.
79
Endnotes

1
Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-
1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982), 1.
2
For more information about Locke's advice for inuring poor British children to labor, see Peter Gay,
"Locke on the Education of Paupers," in Philosophers on Education: Historical Perspectives, ed. Amélie
Oksenberg Rorty (London; New York: Routledge, 1998).
3
John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education and Of the Conduct of the Understanding, eds. Ruth
W. Grant and Nathan Tarcov (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1996), 10.
4
Ibid., 3.
5
Ibid., 161.
6
Ibid., 10.
7
Ibid., 11.
8
Ibid., 11.
9
Gerald Jaynes, "Plantation Factories and the Work Ethic," in The Slave's Narrative, eds. Charles T. Davis
and Jr. Gates, Henry Louis (Oxford; New York: Oxford UP, 1985) 99.
10
Locke, Some Thoughts, 161.
11
David Armitage calls John Locke "a crucial link in the historical chain joining liberalism with
colonialism" due to his involvement in writing the constitution of the first Carolina colony, including legal
provisions for the white inhabitant's "Authority over his Negro slaves of what opinion or Religion soever"
(Armitage 2004 609). Locke's colonial activities left enough of a trace in his work, according to Armitage,
"to sustain a well-developed 'colonial reading' of [his] political theory" (604). Bernasconi agrees, arguing
that Locke's "proposals in The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina and elsewhere must be understood,
not as a reflection of established norms about how slaves should be treated, but as playing a role in
establishing those norms" (Bernasconi 2005 90), and calls Locke "an architect of the new race-based
slavery" (91).
12
Ann Laura Stoler, "Tense and Tender Ties: North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies,"
Journal of American History 88, no. 3 (2001): 830-31.
13
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), 15, 49-
56.
14
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
UP, 1992), 19, 38, 57.
15
Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1997), 11.
16
See for example, Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal
Authority, 1750-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Gillian Brown, The Consent of the
Governed: The Lockean Legacy in Early American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2001); and Holly Brewer, By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in
Authority (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
80

17
I am indebted to Kathleen Brown's discussion of a "race-specific concept of womanhood" in Good
Wives, Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race and Power in Colonial Virginia. (Chapel
Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina
Press, 1996), 108-9.
18
For a broader discussion about the imbrication of modern identity and racial slavery, see, among others,
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993; Robin
Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800. London:
Verso, 1997; Sabine Broeck, "Never Shall We Be Slaves: Locke's Treatises, Slavery, and Early European
Modernity" in Blackening Europe: The African American Presence. Ed. Heike Raphael-Hernandez. (New
York: Routledge, 2003), 235-47; and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of
Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004).
19
Stuart Handley, "Fleetwood, William (1656-1723)," in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,
(Oxford UP, 2004).
20
Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1990), 135-38.
21
For an overview of the rise of a paternalistic rhetoric of slavery in the south, see for example Philip D.
Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel
Hill, 1998), and Willie Lee Rose, "The Domestication of Domestic Slavery" in Slavery and Freedom, ed.
William W. Freehling. Expanded ed. (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1982).
22
For discussion of King James' use of the state/household analogy, see Constance Jordan, "The Household
and the State: Transformations in the Representation of an Analogy from Aristotle to James I," Modern
Language Quarterly 54.3 (1993): 307 (20). Jordan speculates that "it was probably inevitable that
Renaissance apologists for the Monarchy, most especially in absolutist form, would (like James I) refer to
the monarch as a father and to his subjects as children." Jonathan Goldberg writes that the state/household
analogy "was embedded in the Renaissance habit of mind to think analogically and to explain events by
understanding their origins." See Goldberg's "Fatherly Authority: The Politics of Stuart Family Images" in
Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W.
Ferguson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 8-9. R.W.K. Hinton argues that with the rise of the
notion of the British commonwealth as a separate (but still connected) entity distinct from its king,
"political thought had to recognize the relationship of ruler and ruled as the coexistence of two separate
individuals," the nature of whose relationship had to be explained and rationalized. "What was needed was
a basic affirmation in positive terms of a natural and normal relationship in which the active wills of two
parties were indissolubly intertwined." It was a this historical moment, according to Hinton, to legitimize
monarchical rule in the era of the nation state, that political theory turned to the family to naturalize
absolute monarchical power. This moment explains "the plunge into analogy which is so marked a feature
of the political debate of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: and especially the analogy of the family"
because "the analogy of the family best conveyed the idea of two free wills inescapably linked together.
Hence, "As the father loved the son and the son honoured and obeyed the father, so kings and
commonwealths were to be understood as comprising a single family." See Hinton, "Husbands, Fathers,
and Conquerors," Political Studies 15.3 (1967): 291-92.
23
King James VI and I, "The Trew Law of Free Monarchies," in King James VI and I: Selected Writings,
eds. Neil Rhodes, Jennifer Richards, and Joseph Marshall (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 259-279.
24
Gordon J. Schochet writes about the "ordinary seventeenth-century Englishman" that, "One of the
'givens' of his mental equipment was the superiority of parents over their children," in "Patriarchalism,
Politics, and Mass Attitudes in Stuart England," Historical Journal 12.3 (1969): 440.
81

25
Constance Jordan, "The Household and the State: Transformations in the Representation of an Analogy
from Aristotle to James I," Modern Language Quarterly 54, no. 3 (1993).
26
James I, The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, 273-274.
27
See Susan Dwyer Amussen's discussion of British household government manuals in "Political
Households and Domestic Politics: Family and Society in Early Modern Thought" in An Ordered Society:
Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1988). Amussen writes, "Patriarchal
political theory had a long history, and as it developed in the seventeenth century into a justification of
divine-right absolutism, its assumptions about the family fitted well with the prescriptions of the writers of
household manuals" (55).
28
Dod, John and Robert Cleaver, A Godlie Forme of Householde Government (London, 1598, 1621), 6,
157, 166.
29
Gordon J. Schochet, "Patriarchalism, Politics, and Mass Attitudes in Stuart England," Historical Journal
12, no. 3 (1969): 413-41. Schochet writes that in household government manuals, “Discussions of the
nature or content of obedience that was owed to parents and masters suggest only slight differences
between children and servants."
30
Dod and Cleaver, A Godlie Forme, 180.
31
Schochet, Patriarchalism, 415.
32
Ibid., 437.
33
Peter Laslett, "Introduction," in Two Treatises of Government by John Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1960), 46.
34
For a detailed discussion of the impact of contract theory on the figure of the child, see Brewer, By Birth
or Consent. In contrast with my position, Brewer does not believe that the racialized system of slavery in
the colonies had any impact on the legal, rhetorical, or racial status of the American child.
35
John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing,
1980), 7.
36
Richard W. Krouse writes that Locke "manage[s] in the end to reconcile the egalitarian logic of
individual consent with the persistence of hierarchical authority in both civil and conjugal government,
implicitly substituting the patriarchal family for the abstract individual as the central unit of political and
social analysis." See Krouse, "Patriarchal Liberalism and Beyond: From John Stuart Mill to Harriet
Taylor," in The Family in Political Thought, ed. Jean Bethke Elshtain (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1982), 156. For a discussion of the relationship between patriarchal elements of
contract theory and the modern identity of adult (white) women, see Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract
(Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1988), and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, The Gender of Freedom:
Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004).
37
Schochet, Patriarchalism, 415.
38
Locke, Second Treatise, 45.
39
Amussen, Political Households, 64.
40
Locke, Second Treatise, 88.
41
Ibid., 45.
42
Ibid., 31.
82

43
Fleetwood, Relative Duties, 224.
44
Rowan Strong, "A Vision of an Anglican Imperialism: The Annual Sermons of the Society for the
Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts 1701-1714," Journal of Religious History 30, no. 2 (2006), 196-
97.
45
Ibid., 179.
46
Ephesians 5 and 6 discuss three household dependents: "Wives, submit yourselves unto your own
husbands, as unto the Lord"; "Children, obey your parents in the Lord"; and "Servants, be obedient to them
that are your masters . . . as unto Christ."
47
Fleetwood, Relative Duties, 314.
48
Ibid., 225, 235.
49
Ibid., 235.
50
Steve Martinot, The Rule of Racialization: Class, Identity, Governance (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2003),
47.
51
Fleetwood, Relative Duties, 315.
52
According to Martinot, the term "Christian" was an early forerunner of the term "white" (66). He argues
that "the term 'Christian' became more prevalent in opposition to 'Negro,' in order to refuse recognition to
the Christianity of converted Africans" (65). In Good Wives, Brown writes: "Throughout the seventeenth
century, the world 'Christian' surfaced in the laws of Virginia when the English wanted a self-referential
term to distinguish their own powers, privileges, and rights from the burdens, punishments, and legal
disabilities of the peoples they hoped to dominate" (135).
53
See Brown, Good Wives, 136, and Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal
of Colonial Virginia (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975), 216.
54
Quoted in Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race and
Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture
by the U of North Carolina P, 1996), 136.
55
Hortense J. Spillers, "'Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe': An American Grammar Book," Diacritics 17, no. 2
(1987): 72.
56
Betty Wood, Slavery in Colonial America, 1619-1776 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 92.
57
Brown, Good Wives, 134. Historians continue to disagree about which came first—the enslavement of
Africans in the colonies or the British colonial ideology of African racial inferiority. This project itself has
come under criticism. But it's clear that by the late seventeenth century, both slavery and racism were
working in tandem to sustain the extremely profitable extraction of labor from Africans and their
descendants. Winthrop Jordan's infamous claim that the enslavement of Africans was an "unthinking
decision"

has been widely discredited in favor of the view that maintaining slavery in a culture that touted
liberty required concerted effort and discursive innovation. As Barbara Jeanne Fields has argued, "Euro-
Americans resolved the contradiction between slavery and liberty by defining Afro-Americans as a race,"
and this process of "inventing" race was ongoing. British elites, in the metropole and in the colonies,
constantly had to "re-invent and re-ritualize" the ideology of race to "map" the ever-changing, yet relatively
intractable "social terrain" of their slave society. Without an ideology of race, the common humanity of
Africans posed a constant threat to the ontological difference the elite sought to maintain between the free
and the enslaved. See Fields, "Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America," New Left
Review 181 (1990): 95-119, esp. 107-118.
83

58
Brown, Good Wives, 136.
59
Ibid., 129.
60
Warren M. Billings, "The Law of Servants and Slaves in Seventeenth-Century Virginia," Virginia
Magazine of History and Biography 99 (1991): 51.
61
Locke, Second Treatise, 33.
62
Martinot, Rule of Racialization, 55.
63
Spillers, 74.
64
Martinot, 56-57.
65
Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: U
of Pennsylvania P, 2004), 3.
66
Brown, 133-34. Brown writes: "The notion that enslaved women could pass their bound condition on to
their children strengthened the appearance that slavery was a natural condition for people of African
descent."
67
Fleetwood, Relative Duties, 225.
68
Ibid., 238.
69
Edmund Morgan writes: "The commonwealthmen [of Virginia] believed that a monarch, if not curbed,
would inevitably turn tyrant and reduce his subjects to slavery. In eighteenth-century England they saw in
every exercise of executive power the signs of a drift toward tyranny and slavery, which they called on
their countrymen to arrest. . . . They wanted to extend the suffrage and make representatives more
responsive to the people" (369-370).
70
Locke, Second Treatise, 34.
71
Ibid., 37.
72
Fleetwood, Relative Duties, 237.
73
Strong, 194.
74
Laura M. Stevens, "Why Read Sermons? What Americanists Can Learn from the Sermons of the Society
for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts," History Compass 3, no. 158 (2005): 10.
75
Fleetwood, Sermon Preached before the SPG, 499-500.
76
Ibid., 500-501.
77
Ibid.
78
Stevens, 10.
79
Fleetwood, Sermon Preached before the SPG, 510.
84

80
See A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., Shades of Freedom: Racial Politics and Presumptions of the American
Legal Process (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 45: "Traditionally, the justification used by
Europeans for enslaving Africans was that Africans were heathens or savages who could be civilized by
being converted into Christians. Such a justification drew from long historical roots. Christians almost
universally supported slavery if the extension of the Christian faith and civilization was the professed
motive. The corollary custom and practice was that the slave became free once converted to Christianity.
The slave had become civilized through Christian conversion." See also Winthrop D. Jordan, White over
Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina
Press, 1968), 180: "The first hurdle in the path of [slave] conversion was the vague but persistent notion
that no Christian might lawfully hold another Christian as a slave."
81
Article 91 in its entirety reads: "There shall never be any bond slaverie, villinage or Captivitie amongst
us unles it be lawfull Captives taken in just warres, and such strangers as willingly selle themselves or are
sold to us. And these shall have all the liberties and Christian usages which the law of god established in
Israell concerning such persons doeth morally require. This exempts none from servitude who shall be
Judged thereto by Authoritie."
82
Higginbotham, 46. Milton Cantor makes a similar argument about the role of conversion in the formation
of a colonial racial ideology in "The Image of the Negro in Colonial Literature," New England Quarterly: A
Historical Review of New England Life and Letters 36 (1963): "To be black meant to be a slave and to be a
slave meant to be black. But color was not the sum of racial differentiation. There were other factors which
were enlarged and reinforced at every opportunity. The racial barrier had to be strengthened, particularly at
a time when Negroes were becoming Christians and learning to speak English. The threat of cultural
assimilation was met at the threshold—by a theory of socio-cultural inferiority which utilized color, but
which also found other criteria" (459). See also Winthrop Jordan: "What the colonists feared [from slave
conversion], of course, was the challenge to their distinct status and the mental differentiation upon which
it rested. For by Christianizing the Negro, by proffering to him even the meager crumbs of religious
instruction which were prerequisite to baptism, the colonist was making the Negro just so much more like
himself. The Negro's inevitable acquisition of the white settler's language and manners was having
precisely this effect. It was virtually inevitable, too, that the colonists should have abhorred the prospect
that Negroes might come to resemble them. For if the Negro were like themselves, how could they enslave
him? How explain the bid on the block, the whip on the back? Slavery could survive only if the Negro were
a man set apart; he simply had to be different if slavery was to exist at all" (183-84).
83
See Robert Bernasconi, "Locke's Almost Random Talk of Man," Perspektiven der Philosophie 18
(1992): "The reconciliation of Christianity with the enslavement of baptized Africans was the decisive step
in turning Europe into a society whose wealth was based on African slaves, and it was only when the
alliance between the churches and the colonial interest was broken that slavery could be abolished. It is
arguable that it was the shift to interpreting the Bible as a document opposed to slavery, rather than the
introduction of a theory of natural rights, that had the most impact on eventually bringing about the
abolition of slavery" (94).
84
Dana D. Nelson, "Economies of Morality and Power: Reading 'Race' in Two Colonial Texts" in A Mixed
Race: Ethnicity in Early America, ed. Frank Shuffelton (Oxford University Press, 1993), esp. 19, 23-24, 28.
85
Elisabeth Ceppi, "Come When You Are Called: Racialized Servitude and the Division of Puritan Labor,"
Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 16:2 (2005): esp. 216, 219, 225, 228.
86
Holly Brewer writes in By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in
Authority (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), that, "The most common analogy used
to defend slavery in the early nineteenth century was the one Jefferson offered: that blacks were children in
terms of their ability to reason" (358).
87
Brewer, By Birth or Consent, 355-358.
85

88
I agree with Davis' argument that, "Insofar as the Enlightenment divorced anthropology and comparative
anatomy from theological assumptions, it opened the way for theories of racial inferiority," in David Brion
Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Cornell University Press, 1966), 446.
89
Mather, Way of Truth, 8. Although Mather does not use the word "slave," we can infer from his earlier
and later writings that he meant both white servants and black slaves when he used the word "servant."
Mather had adopted the legal and social practice common in Massachusetts of using the term "servant" to
describe African-Americans enslaved for life.
90
Locke uses the metaphor fifty-six times in this work. See for example the following passage in the Essay
(I.I.15): "The steps by which the mind attains several truths. The senses at first let in particular ideas, and
furnish the yet empty cabinet, and the mind by degrees growing familiar with some of them, they are
lodged in the memory, and names got to them. Afterwards, the mind proceeding further, abstracts them,
and by degrees learns the use of general names. In this manner the mind comes to be furnished with ideas
and language, the materials about which to exercise its discursive faculty."
91
Mather, Way of Truth, 1.
92
Ibid., 20.
93
Ibid., 32.
94
Mather, Bonifacius, 67-69.
95
Betty Wood, Slavery in Colonial America, 1619-1776 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), writes: "By the end
of the seventeenth century most New England colonists would have agreed with Mather that these 'children'
[slaves] could never attain adulthood, could never be placed on a par with themselves" (110).
96
Mather, Good Master, 7.
97
Ibid., 51-52.
98
Ibid., 52-53.
99
Mather, Negro Christianized, 28-29. Mather writes that, "In many Families, the Children may help the
Negroes, to Learn the Catechism, or their well-instructed and well-disposed English Servants may do it."
100
Ibid., 6, 7, 13, 18, 23, 26.
101
Ibid., 5-6.
102
Ibid., 23.
103
Ibid., 25.
104
Ibid., 35.
105
Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill,
NC: U of North Carolina P, 1968), 190.
106
Jordan's "unthinking decision" argument has been critiqued by several scholars. See for example Warren
M. Billings, "The Law of Servants and Slaves in Seventeenth-Century Virginia," Virginia Magazine of
History and Biography 99 (1991): 45-62, and Barbara Jeanne Fields, "Ideology and Race in American
History," in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. J. Morgan
Kousser and James M. McPherson (New York: Oxford UP, 1982), 143-77.
107
Godwyn, Negro's and Indians Advocate, 2.
86

108
Ibid., 33.
109
Ibid., 36.
110
Ibid., 3, 9-10.
111
Godwyn writes: "And as Man alone lays claim to this high Privilege, so it is most certainly every Man's,
there being none so despicable or base, but hath as unquestionable a Right thereto, as the most illustrious
and wise Virtuoso; holding the same equally and in common with all others of the like species with himself.
The reason whereof is, because he claims it upon the account of his being Man, and only [as such] hath that
Right. . . . That is, whatsoever is avouchable of any Creature [as such], must be equally true of every
individual Branch and Member of the whole kind or species; all being equal sharers in those common gifts
of Nature" (10).
112
Godwyn writes: "Of all Creatures here below, Man only hath the notion of a Deity, and a propriety in
Religion. Which Right and Propriety doth belong unto him only upon the account of his being Man; that is,
because he is endued with a reasonable and immortal Soul, which alone constitutes him a Man, and
capacitates him for Religion. For without this he were not a Man; could neither be subject to Laws or
Discipline, nor capable of Rewards or Punishments after this Life: Nor in a word, could be any longer
separated, à grege brutorum, as the Poet speaks: Above whom he is only advanced by that Prerogative of
Reason implanted in his Soul, the only proper and apt seat for Religion" (10-11).
113
Ibid., 14.
114
Ibid., 20.
115
Ibid., 60.
116
Ibid., 22-23.
117
Ibid., 79 italics mine.
118
Ibid., 39.
119
Mather, Negro Christianized, 2.
120
Ibid., 6.
121
Ibid., 2-3.
122
Jordan, 215. For more analysis of this shift, see also Charles H. Lyons, To Wash an Aethiop White:
British Ideas About Black African Educability, 1530-1960 (New York: Teachers College P, 1975).
123
Ibid., 189-90.
124
Jordan writes: "In one area of experience, this separation smoothed the path for converting Negroes to
the religion of their masters by allowing conversion to proceed without implying anything very drastically
positive about over-all equality. In another, it meant that the Negro could be judged inferior in certain
respects without any implication that he was less than human, as Jefferson amply demonstrated. . . . By
rendering the concept of mental ability less amorphous than previously, [Locke's separation of intelligence
from religious capacity] helped channel much of the debate on the Negro toward the gratifyingly specific
question of whether or not he was the mental equal of the white man" (440-441).
125
Lyons, 15.
126
Lyons, 22-23.
87

127
Jordan, 254.
128
Brewer, 342.
129
Ibid., 347-348.
130
Several scholars have written about the coincidence of Enlightenment liberal theory and slavery, but
none has focused on the particular conjunction between the Enlightenment figure of the child and the
"Negro."
131
I. M. Green, The Christian's Abc: Catechisms and Catechizing in England C.1530-1740 (Oxford:
Clarendon P, 1996), 14.
132
Ibid., 4.
133
Ibid., 1.
134
Gillian Avery, Behold the Child: American Children and Their Books, 1621-1922 (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins UP, 1995), 27.
135
Jordan writes that, "the popularity of the concept of the Chain in the eighteenth century derived in large
measure from its capacity to universalize the principle of hierarchy. It was no accident that the Chain of
Being should have been most popular at a time when the hierarchical arrangement of society was coming to
be challenged" (228).
136
Mather, Small Offers, 58-59.
137
Locke, Essay, 22.
138
Jordan, 440.
139
Mather, A, B, C of Religion, 6.
140
For example, Mather writes in The A, B, C of Religion: "There are those, who may Confess, I have not
the Understanding of Man; I have not learned Wisdom, nor have I the Knowledge of the Holy Ones. But
yet even these, may come to so much Understanding, and so much Wisdom, and so much Knowledge, as
this; You should hurt no body" (18).
141
Mather, A, B, C of Religion, 31.
142
Mark A. Peterson, "The Selling of Joseph: Bostonians, Antislavery, and the Protestant International,
1689-1733," Massachusetts Historical Review 4, no. 4 (2002): 2.
143
Albert J. Von Frank, "John Saffin: Slavery and Racism in Colonial Massachusetts," Early American
Literature 254 (1994): 258.
88
Chapter One: Revolutionary Childhood

The ongoing scholarly debate about whether Phillis Wheatley's body is "black" or
"white" and whether her poetry is abolitionist or pro-slavery obscures the extent to which
these questions are anachronistic and misleading to ask in Wheatley's case. As Katy
Chiles has recently pointed out, Wheatley wrote in a time when discourses of race were
much more fluid than they would become in the early national and antebellum eras.
1
I
want to add that Wheatley wrote in a time when discourses of slavery were also
structured differently than they would be in later eras. Specifically, many Bostonians,
including arguably Wheatley herself, were against the slave trade and the abuse of slaves,
but not against lifelong servitude in white, Christian families for those of African descent.
And both discourses of slavery and those of race at this time were entrenched in a white
supremacist framework. In this chapter, I argue that focusing on Wheatley's discourse of
childhood can help us to attend to the nuances of her writings on race and slavery.
Very few scholars have analyzed Wheatley's discourse of race and slavery in
conjunction with her discourse of childhood. Caroline Levander's work is an exception.
However, she has not incorporated a "notion of transformable race" into her work, and
therefore erroneously associates Wheatley's poetry with racial essentialism.
2
From this
perspective on childhood and race, Levander reads Wheatley's poem, "To the Right
Honourable WILLIAM, Earl of DARTMOUTH," from Poems on Various Subject,
Religious and Moral (1773), and finds that Wheatley "argue[s] that her 'love of freedom'
depends not on her racial identity but on the experience, acquired 'young in life,' of being
89
'snatch'd' from Africa."
3
Levander's assumption that Wheatley is distinguishing between
her "racial identity" and her "love of freedom" presumes that Wheatley understands her
self to have a fixed racial identity.
Neither Chiles nor Levander cites Paul Gilroy in her work on Wheatley.
Arguably, his reading of "To the Right Honourable WILLIAM, Earl of DARTMOUTH"
informs Chiles' and Levander's readings. In Against Race: Imagining Political Culture
Beyond the Color Line, Gilroy, six years before Levander, reads the poem to mean that
Wheatley's "vivid sense of freedom was conditioned by the fact that [she] had also been
enslaved."
4
But he does not characterize Wheatley as having a fixed racial identity.
Rather, Gilroy reads Wheatley in the context of "The Rootless Cosmopolitanism of the
Black Atlantic." Her work, he argues, allows us to "consider the effects of relocation,
displacement, and forced transition between cultural codes and habits, language, and
religion." From this perspective, Wheatley's reference to her kidnapping in Africa signals
the "transcultural mixture" implicated in her subjectivity, and therefore the diasporic
nature of her identity. For Gilroy, Wheatley's work speaks to "the purity-defying
metamorphoses of individual identity in the 'contact-zones' of an imperial metropolis" in
which "identity was the compound result of many accretions" and "did not defer to the
scripts of ethnic, national, racial, or cultural absolutism."
5
Gilroy anticipates both
Levander's focus on Wheatley's discourse of childhood and Chiles' "notion of
transformable race."
Gilroy's consideration of the child figure in the Black Atlantic is nonetheless
relatively minimal. He considers Wheatley's childhood experiences as they contribute to
90
her "rootless cosmpolitanism," but he does not theorize the specific dynamics of
childhood in the rhetoric of diaspora, as he does the dynamics of gender.
6
However, his
discussion of "Diaspora as a Social Ecology of Identification" engages the Enlightenment
nature/culture dialectic, and thereby provides a way to connect diaspora, childrearing, and
narratives of racial identity. Gilroy offers the concept of diaspora as "a ready alternative
to the stern discipline of primordial kinship and rooted belonging," and "to the
metaphysics of 'race,' nation, and bounded culture coded into the body"—"an alternative
to the sedentary poetics of either soil or blood."
7
Gilroy proposes that the concept of
diaspora challenges the "organicity" that allows national and political belonging to
"appear to be natural rather than social phenomena"—nature instead of nurture. Diaspora
allows us to complicate the nature/nurture mechanism, "to imagine how a more complex,
ecologically sophisticated sense of interaction between organisms and environments
might become an asset in thinking critically about identity." For Gilroy, diaspora can help
us to reimagine narratives of subjectivity in ways that transcend Enlightenment binaries,
"far beyond the stark dualism of genealogy and geography" where the two domains
"beg[in] to trouble each other."
8

To explicate his "social ecology of cultural identity," Gilroy turns to the metaphor
of cultivation which perhaps inadvertently performs the connection between his theory
and Enlightenment childrearing. He asks his readers to "Imagine a scenario in which
similar—though not precisely identical—seeds take root in different places." He calls
attention to the factors that impact the "identity" of his two imaginary plants,
emphasizing unpredictable, complex variation. First, he notes that no two seeds are alike
91
("Plants of the same species are seldom absolutely indistinguishable."), and then he
outlines the elements of the experience the seed will undergo in its lifetime: "Soils,
nutrients, predators, pests, and pollination vary along with unpredictable weather.
Seasons change. So do climates, which can be determined on a variety of scales: micro as
well as macro and mezzo." By analogy, these environmental elements represent the
"transcultural mixture" that constitutes Phillis Wheatley's identity. Gilroy has produced a
kind of "climate theory" of identity that connects childhood and Wheatley to the racial
theories of the late eighteenth-century.
The Child in Wheatley
To appreciate the significance of Phillis Wheatley's participation in the transatlantic
British American public sphere (and her premature disappearance), one must recognize
that she speaks as a model (white) child. Wheatley performs her own childhood
subjectivity in a variety of ways in her 1773 collection. Together, the various discourses
of childhood compose a poetics of dependence, in which Wheatley praises parental
authority and child obedience. In "To the University of CAMBRIDGE, in NEW
ENGLAND," the narrator tells the "blooming plants of human race divine" to accept
Jesus and to avoid sin.
9
Like revolutionaries before 1773, Wheatley uses the colony-as-
obedient-child trope to set the terms for appropriate metropole-colony relations. In "To
the KING's Most Excellent Majesty. 1768," commemorating George III for repealing the
Stamp Act, the poet, speaking for "YOUR subjects," refers to the king as "our father, and
our lord!"
10
She hopes for the stability of imperial power over the colonies, that "The
crown upon your brows may flourish long,/ . . . And all with love and readiness obey!"
92
And she describes colonial subjection to England as a form of freedom: "A monarch's
smile can set his subjects free!"
11
Finally, Wheatley represents her authorial persona as a
child obedient to imperial forces. The collection's last poem, "An ANSWER to the Rebus,
by the Author of these POEMS," begins: "THE poet asks, and Phillis can't refuse / To
shew th'obedience of the Infant muse."
12
Once again, Wheatley compares her child
identity to that of a colony, "Quebec," the other subject of the poem, who also "now
vanquish'd must obey."
Wheatley's intelligibility in the public sphere depended greatly on her subjectivity
as a child during an era when the figure of the child was dramatically politicized and
transformed through its deployment in American revolutionary discourse. In its initial
stages (1764-1773), during which revolutionary writers argued for the rights of child
colonies of the mother country, this discourse acknowledged the child as a subject—and
not a slave—with some right to (indirect) political representation, generating a rhetorical
environment in which children had relevant things to say about their own government.
Through this discourse, Wheatley eluded some of the constraints imposed on the voices
of the enslaved in the public sphere. But after 1773, as the revolutionaries asserted their
colonies' figurative adulthood, their discourse (re)configured and naturalized the young
subject under twenty-one as intellectually incapable of consent to government, and
adequately protected from tyranny by a naturalized benevolent paternalism exercised by
fathers. In Wheatley, we can trace the impact of liberal theory on the private subjectivity
of the child, and hence on the child's voice in the public sphere. And in Common Sense
and the Declaration of Independence, we can see how the child in the public sphere is
93
silenced by its role in undergirding the hegemony of the modern liberal—white male
adult—subject. The demise of Wheatley's career as a publishing poet coincides with her
own adulthood, and with the exclusion of women, slaves, and children from political
participation in the new republic. This exclusion (re)conflated the subjectivities of child
and slave. It undergirded the political subjugation and devalued the political voice of all
children and of African Americans of all ages in and out of slavery well into the
nineteenth-century.
The Child in the Public Sphere
Phillis Wheatley spoke in the early American literary public sphere in the voice of a
white child. As children's participation in the public sphere makes clear, access to
political power does not determine such participation. Neither children, women, nor
slaves in Wheatley's time had representation in the political sphere, except that which
they gained through their influence on the head of the household, yet they had minimal
participation in the public sphere. However, representation in the political sphere shapes
the forms of possible public sphere participation, what Michael Warner calls "the
metapolitics of speech" in the public sphere—"the basis for deciding who speaks, to
whom, with what constraints, and with what legitimacy."
13
Discourses of political
representation produce subjectivities that are more and less intelligible in the public
sphere. The political representation of children was a key point of contention in the late
seventeenth-century debate between patriarchalism and liberalism surrounding the
Glorious Revolution of 1688, and thus a key site of argumentation in the late eighteenth-
century transatlantic dialog about the appropriate relationship between the British
94
metropolitan government and the American colonial states.
14
In rehearsing the arguments
that supporters of Parliament like John Locke has used in the 1680s to mitigate absolute
monarchical rule, colonial American writers both argued for the rights of the colonies as
"children" of the British empire—the first American children's rights debate—and
ventriloquized the voices of children weighing in on matters of state, thus performing
children's participation in the public sphere.
Wheatley participated in the public newspaper and pamphlet "war" that
consolidated colonial resistance to the British empire. In The Letters of the Republic,
Warner describes the development of a print public sphere in eighteenth-century colonial
America that produced "the political structures of modernity." As Warner summarizes
Jürgen Habermas, in the public sphere, "political discourse could be separated both from
the state and from civil society, the realm of private life . . . [and] could therefore regulate
or criticize both" and thus "played a key role in bringing about both the democratic
revolutions of the eighteenth century and the modern nation-states that followed."
15

Warner's main focus is the constitution in the public sphere during this period of
"impersonal" subjectivities whose "validity . . . bear[s] a negative relation to their
persons," epitomized by white male adult property-owners. However, he acknowledges
the presence in print discourse of other, more personal, subjectivities, such as women and
slaves. He suggests that because "written contexts entailed dispositions of character that
interpellated their subject as male, women could write but only with a certain cognitive
dissonance."
16
And he argues that blacks as blacks were effectively silenced by public
discourse. He characterizes Phyllis [sic] Wheatley as an "exception" who was able to
95
participate in the public sphere because she "define[d] [her] public voic[e] as white."
17

Warner's failure to recognize Wheatley as a female subject points to the complexities of
Wheatley's relationship to the public sphere, given that she was simultaneously African,
enslaved, female, and under the age of discretion.
Appreciating Wheatley's presence in the public sphere requires an understanding
of how the private sphere produced by liberalism shapes dependent subjectivities. In The
Gender of Freedom, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon notes that in Warner's narrative "only
white men were de facto granted access to the print public sphere," and that Warner fails
to recognize her claim that "domestic literature and its female producers and consumers
are central to both the literary and the political culture of the early United States" (37).
Dillon accuses Warner of characterizing "privacy and embodiment as inert—as that
which can be left behind in the act of abstraction—rather than as that which is produced
in and through the public sphere, in and through the very process of abstraction" (38).
18

In other words, according to Dillon, Warner's model of the public sphere fails to theorize
adequately the dependence of public "impersonal" (male white) subjectivity on the
particularized subjectivities who are not enfranchised by liberal social contract theory—
the woman, the slave, and the child.
19

Dillon illustrates the way in which the woman is far from absent in the public
sphere. Liberal theory produces womanhood to ground the rational autonomy of the
liberal subject. She writes: "In ascribing the capacity to consent to the individual,
liberalism also, by implication, constructs and relies upon a strong definition of the
modern subject as one who is free, autonomous, and capable of self government and
96
rational behavior."
20
Liberalism defines this universal "modern subject" as male, white
(and adult) through his opposition to the particular, dependent, embodied subjectivities
that liberalism excludes from political representation and relegates to the private sphere.
Dillon theorizes that in defining the modern public liberal subject, the public sphere also
constitutes private liberal subjects. In the public sphere, Dillon argues, "versions of
private subjectivity are publicly articulated and individuals seek to emerge into public
recognition by deploying publicly available codes of subjectivity."
21
On Dillon's model,
Wheatley's "emergence into public recognition" depends on her deployment of existing
private subjectivities.
Wheatley's participation in the literary public sphere therefore must be related to
her identification as a female, a child, and/or a slave. Dillon echoes Carole Pateman's
claim that gender is the primary axis of difference in the "founding fictions of
liberalism."
22
In her feminist critique of liberal theory, Pateman famously argues that the
civil freedom accorded to men by contract theory presupposes the subjection of women
to men. "Contract is far from being opposed to patriarchy; contract is the means through
which modern patriarchy is constituted." The social contract perpetuates a "sexual
contract" that "establishes men's political right over women," and "sexual difference is
the difference between freedom and subjection." Social contract theory necessarily
produces a "private, womanly sphere" that "is part of civil society but is separated from
the 'civil' sphere."
23
Pateman concludes the first chapter of The Sexual Contract with the
claim that sexual difference is more fundamental to liberal theory than any other narrative
of human difference: "the fact that women are women is more relevant than the
97
differences between them. . . . [T]he social and legal meaning of what it is to be a 'wife'
stretches across class and racial difference." Following Pateman's and Dillon's logic,
Wheatley's private subjectivity in the public sphere is based more in her gender than in
her race, class or age.
24

However, as an enslaved African in 1770s Boston, the meaning of wifehood for
Wheatley was not the same as it was for the white daughter of the Wheatleys, particularly
in terms of her relationship to political representation and thus to public sphere
participation. The woman in liberal theory consents to be governed when she enters into
the marriage contract; she agrees to be represented politically by her husband. Even as a
free woman, Wheatley could not marry a white man without breaking miscegenation law,
and black men for the most part did not have the right to participate in government and
were excluded from the privileges of free manhood. Thus Wheatley's opportunity for
access to the political sphere, even the nominal access available through the marriage
contract, was much less than for her white counterpart, if not nonexistent. While Mary
Wheatley married into her parents' social circle and inherited a portion of her father's
wealth, Phillis Wheatley was simultaneously emancipated, disenfranchised, and destitute
at the age of discretion.
Dillon's analysis of the Anglo-American public sphere recognizes the whiteness
of liberal womanhood, but maintains nonetheless the primacy of gender difference in her
narrative of how "liberalism scripts the interrelated public and private lives of citizens of
the liberal state."
25
The universality of the modern liberal male subject relies on the
particularity of the modern liberal female subject. Liberalism "creates and reserves a
98
discrete position for women within its structure" that is "private and familial," and "both
creates and sustains a rigidified opposition between male and female bodies and
subjectivities." Thus liberalism promotes "Legal, political, and cultural definitions of
femininity identif[ying] women as incapable of acting autonomously, incapable of
achieving liberal subjectivity." Despite their political relegation to the private sphere,
women are not absent from the public sphere—quite the opposite. Rather, "the public
sphere is used to create and circulate images that define women as private."
26
Women
"have a voice" in the literary public sphere, "albeit not the voice of the liberal subject:
rather, we might describe such a voice as that of liberal subjectification, a voice that
bespeaks the public and literary construction of private subjectivity."
27
Dillon's model of
the public sphere confirms "the mutual constitution of public sphere recognition and
private subjectivity"—within it, the subjectivity of private "woman" exists in a dialectical
relationship with the subjectivity of public "man."
Despite her focus on gender difference, Dillon acknowledges early on that fictions
of racial difference play a role in the operations of liberal theory: "Race, too, assumes a
prominent position within this account of liberalism and gender insofar as the figure of
the private woman is insistently defined as white."
28
Dillon's account of liberal
womanhood is necessarily an account of liberal white womanhood.
29
With regard to
black women, Dillon suggests that liberalism's exclusion of African-Americans from the
fiction of the modern liberal subject establishes them "in an externalized—but
foundational—position" to that subject "related to private property." She builds on
99
Hortense Spillers' argument that slavery ungenders women primarily by, as Dillon puts it,
denying them "the social-symbolic position of motherhood":
As property, African-American women were not granted a private status
similar to that of white women. . . . Insofar as African-American women
are located in an apolitical space, defined as property rather than persons,
they are not visible as gendered subjects, not visible as signifiers of the
privacy that produces public identity.
30

The African-America female cannot become a voice of even "liberal subjectification,"
because in liberal theory, according to Dillon, race trumps (and erases) femininity.
Dillon does not discuss Wheatley. However, her emphasis on the whiteness of
womanhood suggests that Wheatley could not easily identify herself as a woman in the
early American public sphere. Nor does Dillon's analysis suggest that Wheatley could
easily have deployed the subjectivity of an African slave, since Dillon associates
American-Africanity with the invisibility and silence of apolitical property. Yet Wheatley
speaks in the voice of a female slave. How is this possible? I argue that Wheatley's
presence in the literary public sphere turns on her deployment of the private subjectivity
of the prepolitical child, on her identity as "PHILLIS, a young Negro Girl, who was but a
few Years since, brought an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa," as she is introduced by
her editor in the prefatory materials of her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and
Moral (1773). Wheatley's textual subjectivity is both gendered and raced—a Negro
girl—but it is also, crucially, aged. Wheatley deploys gender, not as a woman, but as a
girl, and she deploys race, not as a piece of African-American property, but as a
Christianized (white) child.
100
Wheatley's inability to secure sufficient subscribers for her second collection of
poems and letters suggests that she could not successfully deploy the subjectivity of a
free black adult woman, despite her marriage and three children.
31
Phillis Wheatley's
participation in the American public sphere—her occupation as a publishing poet—
formally ended when she aged out of childhood in 1774. After having published regularly
since she was in her early teens, she didn't have any poems published between 1776 (the
year after she turned twenty-one) and 1784, the year she died. During this time, she
worked hard to solicit subscriptions for a second volume of poems as the author, Phillis
Peters.
32
The proposal described Peters as "a Female African, whose lot it was to fall into
the hands of a generous master and great benefactor."
33
Though Peters was free, the
proposal emphasized her dependence on a master, and thus her position in the white
private sphere. Even so, she was unable to garner sufficient subscriptions to have her
writings published. Wheatley's silent and short adulthood has many interrelated
explanations, that include the death in 1774 of her mistress, Susannah Wheatley, who had
been instrumental in getting her poems published, wartime prejudice against Loyalists
(like the Wheatleys), and widespread economic hardship. Arguably, however, the public
sphere that excluded Wheatley also reflected the new American social contract that
denied African-American females the capacity and the right to age into political
participation.
In overlooking age as a constitutive element of liberal womanhood, Dillon's
analysis cannot account for Wheatley's participation in the public sphere. The child
subject confounds any attempt to assert the primacy of one narrative of human difference
101
over another. The child subject calls attention to the ways in which at any given historical
moment, categories of human difference are mutually constituted in unique discursive
constellations. In addition, liberal theory divides all subjects into consenting and non-
consenting, thereby forcing all private sphere subjectivities into an uneasy analogical
relationship with each other. For example, the private subjectivities of American white
women and white children share traits in the public sphere. And, as I will illustrate in this
chapter, (white) children and (African-American) slaves are particularly mutually
constituting in the revolutionary era.
The Child in Liberal Theory
Elizabeth Dillon's analysis of liberal theory does not shed much direct light on the role of
children and childhood in constructing modern liberal subjectivity or subjectification.
34

However, her eloquent account of how "the historical work of naturalizing gender
difference itself took place in public sphere debates and in a range of literary and
dramatic representations"
35
provides useful guidelines for understanding the public
sphere constitution and naturalization of age difference. Dillon argues that liberal theory
excludes through the mechanism of universalization which necessarily produces a "logic"
of "particularization": "liberalism imputes an equality of agency among all individuals
who engage in contracts and thus defines the subject in terms of his or her fundamental
human capacity to make choices"; at the same time, liberal theory defines women (as it
does children and nonwhites) as "constitutively unable to exercise choice and agency."
36

Presumed "to lack the constitutive agency that would enable them to participate in liberal
subjectivity," women (and children and slaves) are exiled from political participation and
102
sequestered in the private sphere, in subjugation to the head of the household. The
exclusion of non-male, non-white, non-adult bodies from the status of universal modern
subject proliferates discourses of human difference--the disciplinary languages of gender,
race and age. Thus the rhetoric of liberal "equality" coexists with a "biological
essentialism" which displaces determinations of human difference "from the realm of
politics to that of biology."
37
In liberal theory, formal liberties are co-articulated with the
human sciences that work to make sense of the exclusivities of contract theory.
The feminist insistence that gender is the primary and most significant discourse
of human difference produced by liberal theory obscures how crucial children's assigned
incapacity to consent is to the entire edifice of liberalism. The scholarly reluctance to
grant the significance of age difference to liberal theory emanates in part from scholars'
internalization of liberal theory's own mandate that young bodies, in fact, are innately
incapable of reason—that reason correlates, above all, with bodily age (at least until
senility). Of course children can't consent! In the late eighteenth-century, even when
women's political rights were considered not entirely inappropriate, the notion that
children should have political power remained absurd and laughable. In her tremendously
popular Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799), British writer
Hannah More includes a diatribe against "filial" disobedience and evidence in young
people of "that spirit of independence . . . which characterise[s] the times." Her "logic"
illustrates the position of children in the slippery slope fallacy used to combat egalitarian
thinking:
The rights of man have been discussed, till we are somewhat wearied with
the discussion. To these have been opposed, as the next stage in the
103
progress of illumination, and with more presumption than prudence, the
rights of woman. It follows, according to the natural progression of human
things, that the next influx of that irradiation which our enlighteners are
pouring in upon us will illuminate the world with grave descants on the
rights of youth, on the rights of children, on the rights of babies!
38

Arguably, the generally unquestioned political subordination of the child is what anchors
the exclusion of all other dependents from self-government. In the Revolutionary Era, the
most radical state government, Vermont, extended liberal freedom to all bodies—
including women and adult slaves—except bodies under a set age. Vermont's
Constitution of July, 1777, the only one in the new nation to include an anti-slavery
clause, "after echoing the opening words of the Declaration of Independence, added that
'therefore' no man older than twenty-one years or woman older than eighteen years could
be held as a 'servant, slave or apprentice,' unless by their own agreement."
39
The
putatively irresistible "logic" of liberal theory can never lead to the enfranchisement of
children except in the realm of the absurd; in Lockean rhetoric, the rational autonomy of
the liberal subject is even more obviously dependent on the presumed irrationality of the
child than on the proposed irrationality of the female.
The Child Figure in Revolutionary Rhetoric
Over and over again—in letters, diaries, newspapers, pamphlets, proclamations, and formal
debates—[Americans and Englishmen] likened the empire to a family, a family in which England
enjoyed the rights and duties of parental authority over the colonies while the colonies enjoyed
the corresponding rights and duties of children. No other formulation of the ties that bound the
empire was employed so frequently or so deliberately or so consistently through every phase of
the imperial controversy. Indeed, no other formulation of those ties came nearly so close to being
the very lingua franca of the Revolution.
- Edwin G. Burrows & Michael Wallace
The American Revolution: The Ideology and Psychology of National Liberation
40

104
When the transatlantic public sphere debate about the nature of the relationship between
the British government and its North American colonies began in earnest in 1764, it was
structured by two dominant analogies. First, the conflict between the colonies and the
metropole was cast as a reenactment of the English civil war begun in the 1660s that
resulted in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and the installation of mixed monarchy
made up of a Protestant king and queen, and a more empowered parliament. Second,
writers on all sides of the conflict compared the British empire to a parent, usually a
mother, and the British North American colonies, to her/his children. Both of these
analogies centered the figure of the child in the discursive conflict. The Civil War
analogy reanimated the debate between patriarchalism and social contract theory that
turns on the nature and significance of the filial relationship. And through the parent-
child analogy, colonial writers appropriated the voice and perspective of the child figure
to articulate their grievances and demands and to explain their actions. The discussion
about what rights and obligations to the empire the colonies had and why, was
simultaneously a discussion about what rights and obligations children had to their
parents and the state, and why. And in this latter debate, the private subjectivity of the
child—whether it emanated from a body under or over twenty-one—became
momentarily intelligible in the public sphere.
A third dominant analogy of the revolutionary era—that between the colonists
and slaves—also thematized the figure of the child. Until just before the Declaration of
Independence, "revolutionary" pamphlets were promoting an improved form of
dependence—an improved relationship with the "mother country," not a separation.
105
Thus, colonists clamored to be treated as (Lockean) children rather than as slaves, and
this claim produced a discourse about the difference between childhood and slavery. In
liberal theory, even though neither children nor slaves in a Lockean society had the right
to consent to their government by the head of the household, a father's authority over his
child was not absolute, while a master's authority over his slave was. Unlike a Roman
father or a Filmerian father, a Lockean father's authority was limited. It derived from the
fulfillment of paternal obligations to nurture, and it ceased when the nurturing ceased
and/or when the child became an adult. It did not extend to life and death. And it was
mitigated by the natural inclination that parents had to care for their young and to
promote their healthy development and eventual independence.
Given the entwinement of the discourses of childhood and slavery within the
Anglo-American revolutionary context, the discourse of childhood was as raced as the
discourse of slavery, helping to harden the racialization of childhood begun in the early
colonial period. The articulation in the public sphere of the difference between the child
and the slave reinforced the association between children and whiteness on the one hand,
and slavery and Africanity on the other. And this discourse kept the two interdependent
terms—slave and child—distinct through a racialized discourse of household government
that understood the colonial child to be white, the colonial slave to be black, and the
colonial child-slave to be a contradiction in terms. A child was not a slave and therefore
not black. Only white people could be—and had a right to be—children and not slaves.
Thus the racialization of the discourse of childhood helped to insulate colonists from
charges that their fight for rights was hypocritical in light of their insistence on enslaving
106
Africans and their descendants. Until the eve of independence, white colonists insisted on
their right to be treated by England like children, rather than like slaves (including their
own). Black inhabitants of the colonies, enslaved and excluded from the political status
of childhood, could not easily claim the status of Britain's children or subjects. The child
slave figure was an awkward signifier of the illogic of Anglo-American liberalism.
The Lockean Child in Frances Hutcheson
In its initial stages, colonial resistance drew on some of the most radical implications of
Lockean theory concerning children's rights to make their case against the "Mother"
country, available in the influential writings of Scottish Enlightenment figure, Frances
Hutcheson. Hutcheson's writings on children's rights exemplify the way in which
discourse about childhood proliferated in the wake of Locke, particularly in the second
half of the eighteenth century. Burrows & Wallace argue that Hutcheson's System of
Moral Philosophy (1755) evidently registers the "triumph of contractualism over
patriarchalism in English natural law thinking," in that it argues that "all human
relationships involved open or implied agreements of mutual rights and responsibilities,
not least of all those between inferiors and superiors," including, "Husbands and wives,
parents and children, magistrates and subjects, masters and servants, empires and
colonies."
41

Hutcheson confirms the Lockean position that the "want of reason" is the primary
"Valid exception[] against contracts," and that children, along with "Men disordered in
their reason by sickness, or madness," may be justly prohibited from "entering into any
important contracts, till they attain to some tolerable knowledge of human affairs." And
107
Hutcheson echoes Locke's major claims about the purposes and limitations of paternal
power. "But parental power is founded on a peculiar natural affection, and the want of
reason in their children; it gradually diminishes as their reason advances, and ceases
when it comes to maturity." But Hutcheson devotes much more ink than Locke to the
specific nature of the implicit "contract" between parents and children. Unlike Locke, he
considers more concretely children's rights within the private sphere. He introduces a
language of children's "rights": "[I]nfants . . . have their rights, which the adults are
obliged to maintain." And unlike Locke, he argues that children, too, have a right to resist
parental authority that violates their "contract."
42

In one of the earliest and most forceful statements of children's rights, Hutcheson
writes: "The child is a rational agent, with rights valid against the parents."
43
Hutcheson
grounds his children rights discourse in the Lockean claim that parental power derives
from the parental duty to meet the natural "imbecilities" of childhood, not simply the fact
of generation. Thus when parents fail to do their duty, their parental authority ceases.
44

Given this framework, parental power can only be justified to the extent that it benefits
the child ("the power committed by nature is primarily intended for the good of the
children"), and it cannot be unnecessarily harsh or violent: "The weakly and ignorant
state in which children long continue, suggests the parents right to an unlimited power of
directing their actions for their safety and right education, and yet makes this power easy
and safe to the children, by restraining all unnecessary severity." Thus parental right
"cannot extend so far as to destroy the children, or keep them in a miserable state of
slavery."
45

108
In addition, Hutcheson promotes the idea that children have pertinent opinions
about their own government and that those opinions should be solicited: "The parental
affection suggests the permanent obligation, on parents to preserve their children and
consult their happiness to the utmost of their power."
46
Where Locke argues that the child
is not a subject of the state, Hutcheson argues the opposite—that the child is a civil
subject. "Minors enjoy the same advantages with the aged, and thus are in justice
subjected to the state."
47
The child has rights as a civil subject, and it is his status as a
subject of the state that protects him from parental oppression. Hutcheson contributes to
the political representation of children and thus the intelligibility of their subjectivities in
the public sphere.
Like Locke, Hutcheson argues against the analogy between children and slaves,
but unlike Locke, Hutcheson is opposed to absolute slavery. Hutcheson's doctrine of
children's rights coexisted with a radical opposition to slavery and the Atlantic slave
trade, and with support for British colonial rights. Children, slaves and colonies were
parties to contracts that stipulated certain rights, including the right to resist unjust
authority. Wylie Sypher credits Frances Hutcheson, in his System of Moral Philosophy
(written 1734-1741), with being the first political philosopher to "formulat[e] ethical
principles inimical to slavery as an institution."
48
His children's rights doctrine is
complemented by a slaves' rights doctrine. Like a child, a slave is a "moral agent." Even
if a slave's contract is perpetual, he must "retain all the rights of mankind, valid against
his master." And, like children, slaves "have a right of violently resisting a savage and
barbarous master, tho' he had been subjected to slavery for the justest reasons."
109
Hutcheson in essence bans all slavery by collapsing the difference between slave and
servant, because in his theory the slave-master relation is also based on a contract that can
be enforced by the state.
49

With regard to the question of the metropole-colony relationship, Hutcheson
writes in a section marked "When it is that colonies may turn independent":
Nay as the end of all political unions is the general good of those thus
united, and this good must be subordinated to the more extensive interests
of mankind. If the plan of the mother-country is changed by force, or
degenerates by degrees from a safe, mild, and gentle limited power, to a
severe and absolute one; or if under the same plan of polity, oppressive
laws are made with respect to the colonies or provinces; and any colony is
so increased in numbers and strength that they are sufficient by themselves
for all the good ends of a political union; they are not bound to continue in
their subjection, when it is grown so much more burdensome than
expected. There consent to be subject to a safe and gentle plan of power or
laws, imports no subjection to the dangerous and oppressive ones.
50

Hutcheson does not draw an explicit analogy between child and colony in the above
passage, as Burrows & Wallace note. But his use of the term "mother-country" for the
British metropole signals his engagement with familial rhetoric. Hutcheson gives two
scenarios in which a colonial separation from the parent country is justified, and they
both echo what he wrote about the parent-child relationship: if the parent country's
exercise of power becomes violent, autocratic or onerous, or if the child colony grows
adequately competent to self-govern, metropolitan power is not justified and colonies
have the right to rebel against state authority. Hutcheson likens the colony to a child in
that it has certain basic rights that must be respected, and that it will inevitably outgrow
the need and justification for metropolitan control.
110
Supporters of colonial resistance made explicit the analogy between the British
American colonies and children in a liberal state that were latent in Hutcheson's writings.
Burrows & Wallace argue that Hutcheson's System "implied the possibility that
magistrates or subjects, empires or colonies, could find impressive new ideological
support in direct analogies to the Lockean family whenever they sensed a violation of
their contracted rights and responsibilities."
51
Thus colonists revived the state/household
analogy that Locke himself had sought to dismantle to articulate and promote their cause.
Burrows & Wallace argue that:
the assumption that imperials relations should conform to those between
parents and children in the natural Lockean family . . . . created a new
mode of discourse, a new conceptual paradigm, that enabled all parties to
the controversy to maintain allegiance to contractualist ideology.
This new discourse had far more validity in the late eighteenth-century Anglo-American
context than traditional patriarchalism based in divine authority, with its emphasis on
absolute rule and passive obedience. To deploy the colony/child analogy, was "to insist
on the recognition of the reciprocal privileges and duties of parents and children, was
thus to seek legitimation for political action at the very source of what eighteenth-century
Englishmen and Americans understood by 'natural' law."
52
Like traditional patriarchalists,
colonists wielded the filial relationship to make their claim, but unlike them, colonists put
the focus on the needs and rights of the child, and thus the subjected.
The child/subject analogy was not new in the late-eighteenth-century, but it took
on a "peculiar vitality and power in the Revolutionary context" (B&W 189). The colonies
were often portrayed as small children who could not survive without parents.
53
Until
about 1773, colonists did not dispute their status as dependent children. They focused on
111
gaining for themselves the rights to which all children were entitled: "if the colonies
really were like children, then it followed from the innermost assumptions of the
contractualist tradition that the law of nature did not demand unlimited obedience. . . .
[C]hildren surely have rights that must be respected, and just as surely they are entitled to
protest when those rights are violated."
54
As young children of Britain who did not
consent to be governed, the colonies were entitled to benevolent treatment for their own
good. Though they did not have political representation in the British government or a
direct say in imperial policy, the colonies did have opinions about their own rights and
needs that they made relevant to the conflict.
The Lockean Child in James Otis
But admitting we are children, have not children a right to complain when their parents are
attempting to break their limbs, to administer poison, or to sell them to enemies for slaves?
- John Adams (1765)
Power is a sad thing. Yet I think our Mother should remember we are children, & not slaves.
- Francis Alison (1765)
British kings are the political FATHERS of their people, and the people their CHILDREN; the
former are not tyrants, or even masters; the latter are not slaves, or even servants.
- Jonathan Mayhew (1766)
55

The question of origins had bedeviled early liberal theorists, and it was revisited
by the early colonial criticisms of metropolitian rule. Patriarchalism had a seemingly
airtight explanation of the origins of government: God gave power over men to Adam,
the first father, from whom it descended through patrilineal succession. Citing Aristotle,
Filmer writes "that the Power of Government did originally arise from the Right of
Fatherhood, which cannot possibly consist with that Natural Equality which Men dream
112
of" (28). Regal and paternal authority are one and the same, the first subjects were the
children of Adam, and passive filial obedience is the archetypal model for the subject's
relation to the state.
56
The fifth commandment—Honor thy father—pertains to both filial
and subject obedience.
57
Patriarchalists pointed up the absurdity of an original
government created by universal consent. How did the power that God had supposedly
invested in "the whole Multitude" transfer "to each particular Community," Filmer asked.
Was a General Meeting of a Whole Kingdom ever known for the Election
of a Prince? Is there any Example of it ever found in the Whole World? To
conceit such a thing, is to imagine little less than an Impossibility. And so
by Consequence, no one Form of Government, or King, was ever
established according to this supposed Law of Nature.
58

Anticipating the argument that some members of the kingdom were represented "by
Proxy," Filmer once again, stressed the impossibility of creating or verifying any form of
universal consent:
As to the point of Proxy; it cannot be shewed or proved, That all those that
have been Absent from Popular Elections, did ever give their Voices to
some of their Fellows. I ask but one Example out of the History of the
whole World, Let the Commonwealth be but named, whereever the
Multitude, or so much as the Greatest part of it consented, either by Voice
or by Procuration, to the Election of a Prince.
59

If liberal theorists could not prove that the "multitude" had originally consented to
government, then they could not claim that governmental power descended and emanated
from the people.
The liberal response to the question of origins prompted a discourse of exclusion,
in which theorists argued that universal consent did not require the consent of all
inhabitants—universal consent meant the consent of all adult, male, rational, landowning
inhabitants. Thus the origins debate produced a category of humans who cannot consent
113
that is fundamental to liberal theory's concept of legitimately consenting subjects. In his
response to Filmer, Patriarcha non Monarcha: The Patriarch Un-monarch’d (1680),
James Tyrrell defensively argued that the consent of women and children was not
required for legitimate government:
[A]ll the rest of the Authors Queries about the distinct power of the
Multitude vanish, since though there never was any Government where all
the promiscuous Rabble of Women and Children had Votes, as being not
capable of it, yet it does not for all that prove all legal. Civil Government
does not owe its Original to the consent of the People, since the Fathers of
Families, or Freemen at their own dispose, were really and indeed all the
People that needed to have Votes; since Women, as being concluded by
their Husbands, and being commonly unfit for civil business, and Children
in their Fathers Families being under the notion of Servants, and without
any Property in Goods or Land, had no reason to have Votes in the
Institution of the Government.
60

Tyrrell's answer to Filmer's problematization of universal consent illustrates liberal
theory's defensiveness in the face of charges that liberalism absurdly endowed
subordinate members of the domestic household, especially children, with the right and
capacity to participate in government. According to Tyrrell, universal consent in liberal
theory means the consent of landed male heads of households, and excludes women,
children, and domestic servants. By emphasizing the consent only of the heads of
households, liberal theorists both deflated criticism and preserved the authority of
parents, which all political theorists agreed was a natural and necessary foundational
element of state.
61

James Otis begins his 1764 pamphlet, The Rights of the British Colonies, with a
discussion of the four major theories about the origins of governmental power, by way of
introducing his version of "natural" law, written in nature by God, and read in nature by
114
man. His refutations of "grace," "force," and "property" as bases of governmental power
are brief and fairly absolute, while his response to government based "on compact" takes
up seven long paragraphs that consist mainly of questions that challenge liberal social
contract theory. The opening of the first of these paragraphs focuses on the rights of
women and children:
When and where was the original compact for introducing government
into any society, or for creating a society, made? Who were present and
parties to such a compact? Who acted for infants and women, or who
appointed guardians for them?
Otis did not answer most of the questions he raised. He referred readers interested in his
"sentiments" to "Mr. Locke's discourses of government." But the posing of the questions
set the stage for his approach to the issue of colonial rights. Otis deploys Hutcheson's
expansion of Lockean social contract theory and harnesses the resulting radical
implication that every person has a basic right to be subjected to justified and benevolent
authority that considers his/her interests. He opposes slavery, but not dependency. British
"northern colonies," like women and children, have "guardians," but they are not slaves.
They are born free, and their subordinate status yields a certain, but limited right to
political representation through an intermediary.
62

Hutcheson's benevolent and utilitarian approach to state power infused it with a
discourse of affection that recalled and embellished the parental bias toward children's
interests that Locke had established as a natural law. Otis takes Hutcheson's implied
analogy between child and colony one important step further when he draws it out to
explain how the basis of government is "founded on the necessities of our nature." Just as
children "come into the world forlorn and helpless," requiring nurture, humans require
115
government. The same natural law that "provides for the safety of infants by the principle
of parental love," provides "for that of men by Government." Thus, just as parents govern
for the good of their children, states govern for the good of their subjects. Otis aligns the
colonial American subject with the child of liberal theory, and King George the III with
the protective parent: "We have a King, who neither slumbers nor sleeps, but eternally
watches for our good." Just as parental power is limited by its mandate to work in the
best interests of the child:
The end of government being the good of mankind, points out its great
duties: It is above all things to provide for the security, the quiet, and
happy enjoyment of life, liberty, and property. There is no one act which a
government can have a right to make, that does not tend to the
advancement of the security, tranquility and prosperity of the people.
State power is limited by the good of "the people." Just as parents must consult the
interests of their children, the state "shall incessantly consult [the people's] good." Like
the child, the colony has a right to participate to some extent in its governance. Anything
less is "Tyranny" and "slavery."
63

In contrast with the Declaration of Independence, Otis' pamphlet neither sought
colonial independence, nor colonial equality. Rather, Otis strongly proclaimed the
"subordinate" status of the colonies vis a vis the metropole in terms that evoked their
child-like position:
We all think ourselves happy under Great-Britain. We love, esteem and
reverence our mother country, and adore our King.
If a defection from the alliance of the mother country be suggested, it
ought to be, and can be truly said, that [the colonists'] spirit abhors the
sense of such; their attachment to the protestant succession in the house of
Hanover, will ever stand unshaken; and nothing can eradicate from their
hearts their natural and almost mechanical, affection to Great Britain,
116
which they conceive under no other sense, nor call by any other name than
that of home.
However, Otis insisted that power over the colonies, like that over children, was not
absolute, that childhood was not slavery, and that "the doctrine of unlimited passive
obedience and non-resistance" is "against common sense, as well as the laws of God, of
Nature, and [of] Country." Like the child of liberal theory, the colonial subject had a right
to representation of some kind. Otis recommended that colonists be "represented in
Parliament" and "have some new subordinate legislature among themselves."
64

For Otis, then, the difference between childhood, an acceptable status for a
subjecthood, and slavehood, an unacceptable one, is crucial to his argument. He accepts
child-like dependence: "And could the choice of independency be offered the colonies, or
subjection to Great-Britain upon any terms above absolute slavery, I am convinced they
would accept the latter." What Otis rejects for the colonies is slavery, not dependence.
His pamphlet contains what could be called a poetics of subjection, a discourse that
expresses a desire for benevolent and utilitarian autocratic rule.
65
For Otis, colonists
should seek a status of "subjection" between "absolute slavery" and "subordination."
With regard to the right of resistance, Otis argues that even if the metropole's
actions towards the colonies are against natural law, they must be obeyed until repealed.
However, he stresses the importance of vocalizing complaints. Like Hutcheson, he argues
that even dependents have a right and a duty to express their critique of the metropole.
I take it, every subject has a right to give his sentiments to the public, of
the utility or inutility of any act whatsoever, even after it is passed, as well
as while it is pending. . . . With regard to the public, it is the duty of every
good citizen to point out what he thinks erroneous in the commonwealth.
66

117
Otis laments the "shameful silence" of the colonists in response to metropolitan
encroachment on their rights. The colonists have not taken advantage of their right to
petition the King, one of the "acts of union and succession" that Otis has transcribed in
his pamphlet. "The trade of the whole continent taxed by parliament, stamps and other
internal duties and taxes as they are called, talked of, and not one petition to the King and
Parliament for relief," he writes angrily. Thus Otis' perspective on the purpose of the
public literary sphere is shaped by the need for dependents to express criticism of their
superiors, particularly in petitions, as a form of acceptable resistance to tyrannical
authority.
67

Otis' emphasis on the difference between colonial childhood and colonial slavery
is typical of the early phase of colonial resistance.
68
Otis' take on this contrast illustrates
the radical implications of Hutcheson's Locke. Hutcheson and Otis opposed slavery as a
political status and the British trade in and enslavement of Africans and their
descendants. Otis' colonial rights rhetoric and the associated children's rights rhetoric
went hand in hand with unequivocal opposition to all forms of slavery. In addition, his
opposition to slavery produced a repeated defense of the natural rights of "blacks," a
position unprecedented in British liberal theory.
69

The colonists are by the law of nature free born, as indeed all men are,
white or black. … Nothing better can be said in favor of a trade, that is the
most shocking violation of the law of nature, has a direct tendency to
diminish the idea of the inestimable value of liberty and makes every
dealer in it a tyrant, from the director of an African company to the petty
chapman in needles and pins on the unhappy coast. It is a clear truth, that
those who every day barter away other mens liberty, will soon care little
for their own.
70

118
Otis states that "blacks" and "whites" are "entitled to all the natural, essential, inherent
and inseparable rights of our fellow subjects in Great-Britain."
71
He proleptically
constitutes a transatlantic bi-racial body of British adult male citizens: the colonists "are
men, the common children of the same Creator with their brethren of Great-Britain."
Thus, in Otis' narration of colonial subjectivity, childhood as a status is available to
whites and blacks, and is antithetical to enslavement. Otis embraced hierarchy and
subordination, but not absolute power; every dependent, including the child, had some
right at least to voice criticism of authority. Thus the "radical egalitarianism"
72
of Otis
rendered the child's voice intelligible in the literary public sphere.
Slavery and Race in Wheatley
My reading of James Otis suggests that the popular appeal of Poems (1773) was
connected to Wheatley's child persona and her poetics of subjection. Wheatley's
contemporary readers would have recognized immediately the reference in "On Being
Brought" to the well-known poem for children by Isaac Watts, "A Divine Song of Praise
to GOD, for a Child," featured in the New England Primer. Wheatley's concluding
couplet, "Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain, / May be refin'd, and join
the'angelic train," echoes Watts' fourth quatrain:
Then let me join this holy Train;
And my first Off'rings bring;
The eternal GOD will not disdain
To hear an Infant sing.
….
My Heart resolves, my Tongue obeys,
And Angels shall rejoice,
To hear their mighty Maker's Praise,
Sound from a feeble Voice.
119
Wheatley's reference to Watts' singing infant reiterates the association between childhood
and obedience that resonates throughout Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and
Moral. And it associates Wheatley's poetic subjecthood with the pro-slavery and white
supremacist ideologies built into transatlantic evangelical discourse of the 1760s.
Over the past two decades, Phillis Wheatley has been recuperated as a radical
voice against slavery in all its forms. This reading—evident in the scholarship of Sandra
O'Neale, Betsy Erkkila, and Dwight McBride
73
—evades the child-status of Wheatley's
intelligibility in the public sphere, and her sustained rhetoric of obedience to subjection.
Rather, this scholarship projects a Phillis Wheatley who is an adult with mastery over her
self-expression. To make their case, these critics draw indiscriminately on textual sources
written after the publication of Poems, mostly unpublished, including personal
correspondence, and not all written for publication. I am less interested in probing the
actual beliefs about slavery Wheatley may (or may not) have had in the years between the
publication of Poems and her death just over a decade later. Whether or not Wheatley, as
O'Neale claims, "believed" that her readers "would realize the implications of such
references [in her poetry] and turn from the practice of slavery," seems both impossible to
verify and irrelevant to questions of rhetorical constraints in the public sphere.
74
I want to
understand how the conception of childhood that rendered Wheatley's Poems intelligible
and acceptable in the literary public sphere shaped her poetics of slavery and race in ways
both in and beyond her control.
Sondra O'Neale's influential 1986 essay in Early American Literature emphasized
Wheatley's "status as a slave" in her life, and concluded that Wheatley was "an
120
abolitionist." O'Neale makes the argument that although "the slave's offering was
carefully censored to ensure that it was in no way incendiary," Wheatley was able to
"mak[e] subtle, yet effective, statements against slavery" using "biblical myth, language
and symbol." In her discussion of "On Being Brought," O'Neale refers to Wheatley as "a
Black woman and a community pariah (i.e., still enslaved despite her popularity)" who
illustrates in this poem "her conscious manipulation of prevailing associations of
blackness" in order to "make some of her most comprehensive comments on slavery."
According to O'Neale, some of Wheatley's readers "would have understood that she was
not only speaking of religious salvation but implying redemption from slavery as well."
O'Neale's Wheatley is an adult and master manipulator of language who writes in order to
dissuade her readers from supporting slavery.
75

Dwight McBride's explication of Wheatley's "poetics of liberation" echoes
O'Neale's in many ways. McBride refers to Wheatley as "a black, female poet," whose
"resistance to slavery is coded in her figurative, poetic language." He reads in "On Being
Brought" a "condemnation of slavery," and considers the poet "a master of the very
language of ‘reason.’"
76
Like O'Neale and McBride, Betsy Erkkila praises Wheatley's
mastery of language in making her "subtle critique of . . . the oppressive racial structures
of Revolutionary America." She claims that Wheatley "knew how to manipulate
language, image, and phrase in a manner that destabilizes while it appears to reinforce the
categories of the dominant culture," and that "she makes subtle use of ambiguity and
irony, double meaning and symbolic nuance." More than O'Neale and McBride, Erkkila
focuses on Wheatley's womanhood, asserting Wheatley's "complex position as black
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woman slave," and using the word "woman" repeatedly to refer to Wheatley. Erkkila
reads Wheatley in the context of Abigail Adams' famous 1776 epistolary plea to her
husband to "Remember the Ladies," and "the importance of the American Revolution in
giving women the language and metaphors to 'foment' further rebellion in their struggle
for citizenship, suffrage, and full human rights." Erkkila reads Wheatley by way of
Abigail Adams despite the fact that the intelligibility of Adams' voice had everything to
do with her whiteness, her marital status, and her adulthood. Erkkila's approach also
conflicts with the fact that Wheatley's extant opus, particularly Poems, in general is
remarkably free of references to the gender of her textual persona.
77

O'Neale, McBride, and Erkkila are also absolutely sure that Wheatley's writings,
particularly "On Being Brought," destabilize white supremacy, and this links their work
to that of Chiles. Although most scholars do not discuss Wheatley's poetry in terms of
late-eighteenth century racial theory, as Chiles does, their arguments are like hers in that
they all argue that Wheatley exploits the fluidity of the era's racial discourse. O'Neale
acknowledges that Wheatley wrote during a period when for many "the color black was
the most ominous of signs" (145). According to the "simplified colonial definitions of
white and black," "white became associated with light, purity, safety, and understanding,
God and heaven; black, in turn, represented insecurity, sin, self-loathing, fear, ignorance,
eternal death, Satan and hell" (146). Yet, O'Neale claims that Wheatley, in poems like
"On Being Brought," "is covertly undermining its definitions of race by equating
blackness with a spiritual illumination rather than with a condition of physical
pigmentation."
78
McBride, like O'Neale, claims that Wheatley uses her Christianity to
122
challenge "white racism" and to deploy a "rhetoric of racial liberation."
79
Erkkila repeats
this claim in her reading of "On Being Brought," arguing that "the poet speaks as an
African, turning the terms of Christian orthodoxy into a critique of white hypocrisy and
oppressive racial codes."
80
For Erkkila, Wheatley's work "suggests a certain openness and
indeterminacy in black-white relations during the Revolutionary years."
81

Chiles' main argument is that Wheatley's "symbolics of metamorphosis," her
deployment of "a notion of transformable race," allows her to substantiate the
relationship between poetic genius and dark skin, and to rescript "the relation between
color and aesthetics." According to Chiles, Wheatley negotiates "a contemporaneous
understanding of race as a condition incrementally produced by external factors and
continuously subject to change"; for Chiles, Wheatley proposes "that divinely bestowed
blackness becomes problematic only when it is linked directly to slavery." Chiles reads
Wheatley as disassociating "blackness" from negative connotations through a
"monogenetic natural history" which emphasizes dark skin color as an equal element in
"a God-inspired design, one that establishes universality and variegates beautifully the
diversity of humankind."
82
For Chiles, as for O'Neale, McBride, and Erkkila, Wheatley
exploits the instability of the white/black binary that props up colonial slavery.
The celebratory reading of Wheatley as the black woman anti-racist abolitionist
downplays the pro-slavery and white supremacist contours of the language of evangelical
Christianity that was such a pronounced part of her idiom. The religious revivalism of the
mid-eighteenth century did accentuate the radical egalitarianism inherent in Christianity,
but it also contained associated challenges to authority with a pro-slavery rhetoric of
123
obedience, and what Roxann Wheeler calls a "Christian semiotics" that grafted skin color
onto a hierarchized binary of good (white) and bad (black).
83
The monogenetic
worldview that infused contemporary natural history did posit a basic equality among all
humans, and a common descent from Adam, but it also reiterated Lockean associations
between whiteness and European superiority, and between blackness and African
inferiority. Isaac Watts begins his opus on epistemology, Logick: or, the Right Use of
Reason in the Enquiry after Truth (1724), patterned after John Locke's Essay, with the
claim that "the improvement of Reason hath raised the learned and the prudent in the
European world, almost as much above the Hottentots, and other savages of Africa, as
those savages are by nature superior to the birds, the beasts, and the fishes." I argue that
Wheatley's rhetoric was enmeshed in the pro-slavery and racist discourses that she
engaged to be intelligible, and that Wheatley's collection, Poems, makes this point.
When writing about Wheatley's views on slavery, scholars conflate attitudes
toward the trade in slaves with Africa and the status of slavery in the colonies. Many
evangelicals on both sides of the Atlantic were against the trade, but supportive of the
enslavement of Africans and their descendants, not least because it had the potential to
Christianize them. Wheatley's rhetoric of obedience references Ephesians VI, "Servants,
be obedient to them that are your masters." This Biblical reference was widely used in
sermons to convince slaves to accept their status on earth, and to look for freedom only in
the after-life. Wheatley's well-received elegy on the death of the popular revivalist
preacher, George Whitefield, associates her acceptance in the public literary sphere with
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Whitefield's accommodation of slavery in the name of Christianity and the rise of a
"paternalistic ethos" among slaveowners.
Alan Gallay points out that the Great Awakening had a radical aspect: "it was an
emotionally charged, popular movement that operated beyond established political and
religious channels." Through the message that "the only distinction among men before
God lay in the state of their souls," "People of every class and color were beckoned to
seek fellowship in Christ."
84
However, by the 1740s, evangelicals in the South, including
Whitefield, gave in "to the political exigencies of a slaveholding society" and retreated
from a stance that could be construed as anti-slavery. Whitefield continued to oppose the
slave trade, but by the 1750s, he owned a slave plantation and accepted slavery in
Georgia. McBride calls Whitefield, "a friend to American Blacks."
85
However, according
to Gallay, Whitefield and other evangelicals intent on converting the enslaved, "learn[ed]
. . . to rationalize the system: they were raising Africans from their heathenish condition
and introducing them to Christianity . . . . [H]owever horrible a slave's existence in this
world, he might, if saved, find bliss in the more important afterworld."
86
As radical as
Christianity could be, the Bible also could be used to show that obedience to God meant
acceptance of one's status as a slave, and that eternal freedom in heaven could
compensate for unfreedom on earth.
In Wheatley's elegy for evangelist minister George Whitefield that secured the
patronage of the Countess of Huntingdon, the poetic persona is neither a woman, a slave,
or a black body, but a white American child. The ventriloquized voice of Whitefield
preaches to "youth," "Americans," and "Africans" (ll.22, 32, 34). Although Whitefield's
125
sermons drew young and old, and women and men, the poem does not mention any
female or enslaved "auditories" (ll.4). The poem's speaker identifies herself as an
American and a child, and separates herself from the identity of "African." The speaker is
a member of "we Americans," who are in the position of Whitefield's children in England
and the colonies, the "Orphans" he has left behind, who "mourn,/ Their more than father
will no more return" (ll. 40-41). The transition from African to American that the poem
enacts includes a movement toward a paternalistic ethos and white childhood
subjectivity. We can see this movement as well in the revision to the poem that occurred
for its inclusion in the collection three years later. As McBride points out, the line, "You
shall be sons, and kings, and priests to God," replaced an earlier version that read: "He'll
make you free, and Kings, and Priests to God." "Free" becomes "son," as transatlantic
proslavery Christianity, shared by the Wheatleys and the Countess of Huntingdon, asks
slaves to accept a child-like dependent status until after death. The racial inclusivity of
Whitefield's "auditories" notwithstanding, the revivalist movement was not anti-slavery,
and it promulgated slave obedience and African inferiority.
The evangelical stance connected slavery to racial identity in part by associating
all Africans and their descendants with the "heathenism" of Africa, infusing Christian
pro-slavery sentiment rooted in monogeneticism with the racialized binaries of Lockean
natural history in which the inhabitants of "torrid" climates lacked reason, religion, and
civility. The fluidity of racial categories in Wheatley's era could never entirely escape a
white supremacist framework. In her analysis of Wheatley's contemporary, Cugoano,
Roxann Wheeler argues that writers could not control the emergent racism of climate
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theory. The contemporary explanations of human difference "all looked to the
environment, especially temperature and terrain, to explain human variation in manners,
body, and society" and emphasized mutability. However, as Wheeler argues, "these very
same discourses prove difficult to maneuver" because of their "strong Eurocentric
impulse," "a conviction of African cultural inferiority," and "the association between
blackness and sin."
87
Buffon's climate theory, dominant in the 1760s, did embrace a
monogenetic model, claiming that all humans, including "Negroes," had descended from
Adam. And he believed that racial transformation could take place within one generation.
Buffon gives the example of a South African infant who grows up white when raised
from birth in a Dutch household. As this example suggests, Buffon also held that Adam
was white and that non-white skin pigmentation was a degeneration from a white ideal
resulting from the dispersal of human populations after the flood, a secular variation of
the curse of Ham explanation for dark skin that associates it with sin.
In emphasizing transformation, Wheatley's Poems engages the theme of subject
formation which is entangled in contemporary theories of childrearing and racial
difference. As Buffon's work suggests, Wheatley's blackness could have been perceived
as temporary since she had been transported to a cold climate, lived among and dressed
like "civilized," slave-owning white Christians, and had herself learned to read and write,
and converted to Christianity. Robert Reid-Pharr and Katy L. Chiles are at two poles of
criticism on the issue of Wheatley's "blackness" in Poems. Reid-Pharr reads "On Being
Brought" as a "paean to slavery and Anglo-American imperialism" through which
Wheatley communicates "a conception of her own ontology that is precisely not fettered
127
by geography or race."
88
On the other hand, Chiles devotes her entire essay to
underscoring Wheatley's focus on her own "sable race," claiming that Wheatley "links
her race with poesy, even though environmentalism desired to separate them."
89
I think
the stand off between Reid-Pharr and Chiles, like the question of Wheatley's intentions,
distracts from the question of what kinds of cultural work the collection of poems
performed.
Scholarly approaches to Wheatley's work establish that she speaks in a code only
the enlightened can understand, and then decipher that code. Rafia Zafar, for example,
argues that "the protest embedded in such verses as 'On Being Brought from Africa to
America' has been invisible to many readers because of [Wheatley's] oblique
argumentation."
90
Zafar argues that Wheatley "donned a mask of generic 'whiteness' that
sometimes camouflaged too well her own position."
91
Scholars who insist that they can
read between the lines of Wheatley's apparent support for slavery and white supremacy in
"On Being Brought" only underscore the extent to which at least one register of
Wheatley's "multivalence" (Zafar's term) reaffirms slavery and racism. As Saidiya
Hartman asks, how can we tell "the difference between 'puttin' on ole massa'—the
simulation of compliance for covert aims—and the grins and gesticulations of Sambo
indicating the repressive construction of contented subjection?"
92

Russell Reising takes an alternative and more productive approach to Wheatley,
moving from Wheatley's political beliefs to her work's rhetorical ambivalence, from the
"extremes" of reading either "total accommodation" or "total resistance" in her work to
reading her work as "slave discourse and praxis" that "need[s] to be imagined in
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dialectical relationship to the hegemonic white culture, substantiating particular beliefs
within that culture while also tactically responding to it" (82). For Reising, "Wheatley's
relationship to different areas of dominant cultural practice is strained, contradictory, and
ambiguous."
93
Reising makes the very good argument that Wheatley's poetry "enacts the
drama" of the colonial slave subject's becoming, "a drama of the ontological and political
ambivalence experienced by the slave subject under dominance" (84) and "the drama of
the African American subject under the dominance of white discursive practices" (113).
Reising does not discuss Wheatley's positionality as a child. He refers to her as an
"African American woman slave."
94
However, his reading of "On Being Brought"
connects the poem and the collection its in to the "disciplinary apparatus" of slavery and
the racial resonances of "refinement." Reading "On Being Brought" as an enactment of
the drama of child-rearing or "cultivation" (Reising's term) allows me to provide yet
another reading. Reising reads "On Being Brought" as "from the point of view of the
slave subject,"
95
but it could even more convincingly be read as from the point of view of
the child subject. Because childhood is a racially privileged status, Wheatley's embrace of
child subjectivity necessarily obscures the violence of her "cultivation."
If we read "On Being Brought" as an enactment of the drama of being disciplined
particularly within the discourse of childrearing, we can see how the poem also enacts the
mechanics of Enlightenment hierarchical trajectories and analogical associations. Reising
writes about the poem: "the attainment of secular 'refinement'" that occurs in the last line
of the poem, "also marks the moment of Wheatley's self-insertion into the discursive
practices of white culture and, consequently, the moment she must perforce deny her
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blackness." Reising connects the racial inflection of "refinement" to "Wheatley's
contradictory existence as accomplished woman and as ornamental slave."
96
I agree with
Reising's reading of "refinement" as a whitening process, but I see it as connected
specifically to Wheatley's subjectivity as a white child. It expresses the impossibility of
black childhood.
In Reid-Pharr's searing attempt "to disestablish her status as the original author of
a noble Black American literary tradition," he makes the important point that it is
Wheatley's "domestication" in the white Wheatley household that disrupts the connection
between her "black body" and her textual blackness ("to think and write black"). Reid-
Pharr writes: "as she is brought into the Wheatley household and established there as a
(Christian, American) daughter, she disrupts the seamlessness of black ontology."
97
This
reading supports my contention that Wheatley's literary subjectivity as a child reinforces
her whiteness because childhood as a status is disconnected from black bodies,
"Negroes," in the British American colonial context.
The way that some Massachusetts divines responded to the traditionally silent
voices released by the first Great Awakening illustrates how authorities imagined
colonial subjectivities in a way that denied the possibility of black childhood. In 1743,
Charles Chauncy, Pastor of the first Church of Christ in Boston, complained in a letter to
the local Society for the Propagation of the Gospel about "the Rise of so many Exhorters"
that "have held forth in the publick Congregations":
Nay, there are among these Exhorters, Babes in Age, as well as
Understanding. They are chiefly indeed young Persons, sometimes Lads,
or rather Boys: Nay, Women and Girls; yea, Negroes, have taken upon
them to do the Business of Preachers.
98

130
As in Cotton Mather's rhetoric four decades earlier, the subjectivities of the "young" in
the colonial household are racialized along a white/black binary. "Lads," "Boys,"
"Women" and "Girls," are in one group and "Negroes" are in the other. The Euro-
American, white subjectivities are gendered and attentive to age differences, while the
black-American subjectivity is a mass, undifferentiated by either age or gender.
The poem, "On Being Brought," enacts the drama of becoming an intelligible
child subject, a drama which shapes the collection as a whole. The title phrase, "On
Being Brought," does not appear in the poem. It prefigures the poem's first line "'Twas
mercy brought me from my Pagan land," and it echoes the "Attestation" to Wheatley's
authorship in the collection's prefatory materials. The eighteen signatories, including
Wheatley's owner and Charles Chauncy:
do assure the World, that the POEMS . . . were . . . written by PHILLIS, "a
young Negro Girl, who was but a few Years since, brought an uncultivated
Barbarian from Africa.
The title also echoes the language of John Wheatley's prefatory letter: "PHILLIS was
brought from Africa to America, in the Year 1761, between Seven and Eight Years of
age." The multiple uses of the term "brought" emphasize the poet's dependence on
material and rhetorical itineraries. The poem thematizes the racialization of available
colonial subjectivities, and the trajectories along which these subjectivities are assigned
value.
Critics have shown how the second to last line of the poem troubles the racist
underpinnings of religious conversion. The commas in, "Remember, Christians, Negros,
black as Cain," trouble the divisions between "Christians," "Negros," and "blacks."
131
However, the commas also call attention to the way that analogies instantiate difference
as well as sameness. The syntax underscores the disjuncture between "Christians" and
"Negroes," suggesting in the reference to the curse on Ham the connection between the
disjuncture and race. The speaker acknowledges the cultural association between
Africans, blackness, and the "diabolic," and moves away from the sinful stain of that
association. The poem aligns the trajectories that shape the mutability of racial
subjectivity. The speaker identifies with "our sable race," at a midway point between
black and white. The movement from "Africa" to "America" in the title aligns with
movement from "Pagan" to "redemption," from "benighted" to "refin'd," from black to
white. The ethos of obedience within which the collection operates mandates that
subjects desire the whiteness of the idealized British national subject. The title and first
line of the poem also echo the lines in "To the University of Cambridge," in which the
speaker tells the white young men:
'Twas not long since I left my native shore
The land of errors, and Egyptian gloom:
Father of mercy, 'twas thy gracious hand
Brought me in safety from those dark abodes.
Here the poem points to the importance of Christianity in the speaker's subject formation,
and the Christian semiotics that constrain that formation. The "dark abodes [bodies]"
associated with Africa are obstacles to religious and intellectual enlightenment. The
phrase "dark abodes" appears again in an elegy in the collection entitled, "On the Death
of a young Lady of Five Years of Age," in which the speaker chronicles the "flight" of
the child from life to afterlife, "From dark abodes to fair etherial [sic] light." Before
speaking in quotes in the voice of the dead white girl, "Nancy fair," the speaker
132
encourages the bereaved parents to aspire to speak Nancy's language, to "learn to imitate
her language" in "heav'n's blest bow'rs." This is precisely what the speaker proceeds to do
in the poem, to imitate the (dead) white daughter's voice when she addresses her parents
from above.
This elegy is another example of the way that the white child speaks in Poems. It
also reinforces the notion that Wheatley is better off at the Wheatley's than in Africa. If,
as Bassard has argued, "dark abodes" refers to the Middle Passage, the poem may contain
a critique of the slave trade, but the movement of the poem still is toward the civilizing
force of Christianity, the Wheatley's and whiteness.
Declaration of In/Dependence
The shift from British colonies to American nation was a shift mainly for white men: the
Revolution is a poor period marker of decolonization.
Michael Warner, What's Colonial about Colonial America?
Revolutionaries deployed the child figure, first to dramatize their claims against the
Mother Country, a position that temporarily enforced the rights of children, and then to
mark their own adulthood, a position that subordinated and silenced all those deemed
dependent, including children, women, Native Americans, and slaves. In 1776, adult,
white, male colonists discarded their self-figuration as children along with their
dependence on Britain, in order to "come of age" as a nation. They simultaneously
legislated the exclusion of all others—all "dependents"—from political participation,
ironically relying on the child figure to maintain patriarchal control over dependents,
including slaves of all ages, within the framework of a government based on the consent
of the governed. The "We" of the Declaration of Independence rhetorically built upon the
133
containment of the domestic sphere and its recent insurrections. The identity of the nation
that had come of age, built upon emphasizing the unfitness of those who had not come of
age to participate in their own government. Unlike Thomas Jefferson, for example,
Wheatley could not come of age with or in the nation. The abrupt end to her publishing
career and life thus enact the new republic's silencing of non-adult, non-white, non-male
subjects.
Scholars across the interpretive and disciplinary spectrum have emphasized that
despite the founders' continuation of slavery and exclusion of women and African-
Americans (among many others) from political representation, the Declaration of
Independence contains an egalitarian "logic" that accounts for the possibility and eventual
success of the end of slavery, women's suffrage, and the civil rights movement, among
other extensions of the franchise. In the most charitable reading, the founders purposely
established the language and institutional ideology for abolishing slavery and
enfranchising all citizens, but did not have the capacity—mental, moral, or economic—to
carry out their own logic.
Scholars make a persuasive case for the Declaration's progressive logic. They
point to the way that the enslaved and white women wrote documents that were revisions
of the Declaration to promote their own enfranchisement. Yet, the Declaration also
fulfills another line of logic that obstructs the first. The continued social oppression of
white women and African-Americans of both genders, should alert us to the innate
limitations of liberal logic. While a small body of scholars have elaborated on Foucault's
important insight that liberal rhetoric and the disciplines were simultaneous and mutually
134
informing (the establishment of "natural" sexual and racial difference), even the most
rigorous immanent critiques of social contract theory have failed to question the
automatic disenfranchisement of all persons under a certain age—whether female or
black. In contrast, I suggest that the exclusion of younger persons from political
representation and the concomitant naturalization of age difference (and proliferation of a
rhetoric of children's natural inferiority) is a significant, but often invisible, limit that
grounds the self-governing individual, capable of consent, who has left childhood behind,
and is the model framework for the exclusion of African-Americans from egalitarian
logic. It has been crucial to the process of the naturalization of race and gender (and
class) difference upon which "democratic" exclusions depend. The role of age in the
"founding fictions of liberalism" is thus crucial to understanding the representation of
slavery and race in American discourse.
The argument that the logic of the Declaration is contagious also draws evidence
from the "universal" language of the document. It's true that the work does not mention
slavery or women or children for that matter. So how can/does it contain the elements of
its own obstruction? The answer is that it is participating in a transatlantic discourse of
social contract theory that produces all the subjectivities of the society it creates, not
simply the ideal, self-governing citizen. It also proliferates the subjectivities of those
excluded from consent to contract within a social contract state--the members of the
private sphere with no direct political representations: woman-wife, child, servant, and
slave, and thus produces the fictions of racial, sexual, class, and age difference in and on
the bodies of "dependents" upon which these exclusions depend.
135
With the important exception of hereditary enslavement, the early American
republic adopted Locke's structure and organization of the domestic sphere. Adult women
consented to government through a marriage contract with the head of a household. The
male child over the age of discretion participated directly in government, on an equal
footing with his father, unless he became a servant in another household. The servant
consented to government through a labor contract with the head of a household. Neither
persons under twenty-one, nor slaves consent to government. They are not citizens. They
are under the absolute rule of the male head of the household. In an 1816 letter, Thomas
Jefferson articulated the contract ideology. He wrote in a letter discussing ward
governments, that "even if Virginia were . . . a pure democracy, in which all its
inhabitants should meet together to transact all their business, there would yet be
excluded from their deliberations, 1. infants, until arrived at years of discretion. 2.
Women … 3. Slaves."
99
When Jefferson used the phrase, "all its inhabitants," he did not
want to be understood to be referring to everybody. He did not mean to include children,
women, or slaves. Rather, for Jefferson, eighteenth-century American political discourse
imposed and demanded a gendered and racialized reading practice for its coherence.
Adapting social contract theory to a government that celebrated freedom and slavery
simultaneously required a common epistemology that understood the universal Lockean
person born equal to be male, and white and adult.
Despite the ubiquity of the parent-child metaphor in the pamphlet debate leading
up to the separation from Britain, in the Declaration of Independence, the thirteen
colonies are nowhere figured as children and Britain is never described in familial terms
136
(whether Mother Country, Father King or parent). The entire document eschews
discussion of dependence in any of its forms. The fate of dependents in the new republic
is sublimated, denied, and exiled to the private sphere of the empire of the father. The
Declaration of Independence sought political independence for an elite group of men,
including independence from interference in the private sphere of family and property
ownership. Although, as Betsy Erkkila notes, "those who advocated a break with England
did so in the language of the two primary social tropes: the family and slavery," neither of
these tropes appears in the final version of the Declaration of Independence. In their
efforts to represent themselves as "Men" who are "created equal," "endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable Rights," and entitled to be representatives of "free and
independent states," the founders eschew reference to themselves as dependents, whether
children or slaves. In addition, the Declaration obscures the role of the founders' own
dependents—women, children, and slaves—in the independence they seek to assert.
The only reference to slavery in the Declaration occurs in the list of colonial
grievances against King George (not the "mother country"): "HE has excited domestic
Insurrections amongst us." The grievance refers obliquely to Dartmouth's offer of
freedom to slaves who fought for the British against the colonists. Thomas Jefferson, the
primary author of the Declaration, lost over thirty slaves to the British side. The
complaint also documents the founders' rhetorical strategy of exiling the issue of slavery
to the domestic sphere to lessen the appearance of conflict between the founder's
egalitarian ideals and their insistence on maintaining patriarchal control over their wives,
children, and slaves. One purpose of the Declaration was to quell the "domestic
137
Insurrections" provoked among all dependents by the founders' revolutionary rhetoric,
and to reinscribe the exclusion of dependents from political participation into the
workings of the new republic.
The conventional description of the North American British colonial break with
the British metropole as a "revolution against patriarchal authority" obscures the ways in
which the founders (re)instituted patriarchal dominion over free women, free children,
and all those enslaved. Fliegelman, and those scholars who have adapted his
revolutionary paradigm, have focused on one particular strain of Locke's influence on the
colonial break from Britain—the strain that links paternal authority to "filial freedom and
self-realization" and therefore results in "a new parental ideal characterised by a more
affectionate and equalitarian relationship with children" and an emphasis on "the right
and obligation of all children to become fully autonomous and self-reasoning adults."
100

Thus, for Fliegelman, the "quintessential motif" of American Revolutionary rhetoric is "a
call for filial autonomy and the unimpeded emergence from nonage."
101
Yet, this
"unimpeded emergence" was only possible for a small group. Ultimately revolution
asserted political power of white adult males--a backlash against the more revolutionary
forces unleashed in the public sphere in the 1760s. This figure of the white male adult
was built upon the complete exclusion of children in age from political participation. The
profound commitment to government by consent co-existed with an equally deep
dedication to excluding the majority of the new nation's "inhabitants"--women, children,
Native Americans, and slaves (and many others)--from political participation.
138
Revolutionary writers drew on Lockean theory to promote the justice of their
rebellion, as many scholars have noted. But they also drew on Lockean theory to
structure a political dominion over dependents, including slaves, that brooked no
rebellion under any circumstances. They accomplished all this by strategically wielding
the analogy between children and slaves implicit in Locke's social contract theory—first
to strengthen the rhetoric of their own "enslavement" at the hands of the British, and then
to sequester the issue of slavery and the enslaved in the politically invisible and silent
domestic sphere. First the terms of child and slave were contrasted, and after 1773, they
were collapsed. The emphasis on the "logic of Republican thought" that promises to
extend equality to all eventually has evaded the ways in which enlightenment
universalism necessarily produces excluded subjectivities through an enlightenment
discourse of "natural" difference, such as that between child and adult. The colonists who
wrote and benefitted from the United States Constitution founded their political
independence upon the political dependence of those colonial inhabitants they deemed
incapable of political participation and relegated to "natural" inferiority and the private
sphere.

139
Endnotes

1
Katy L. Chiles, “Becoming Colored in Occom and Wheatley's Early America," PMLA: Publications of
the Modern Language Association of America 123, no. 5 (2008): 1398-417. Chiles writes that Wheatley's
work contains "a notion of transformable race: a contemporaneous understanding of race as a condition
incrementally produced by external factors and continuously subject to change"; this concept requires "a
historically specific, transformational model of critical race theory" (1399).
2
Caroline Levander, Cradle of Liberty: Race, the Child, and National Belonging from Thomas Jefferson to
W. E. B. Dubois (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006). Levander writes: “the depictions of the child consistently
featured in various popular narrative forms in the roughly hundred-year period between the wars represent
a primary, and increasingly urgent, national question of where freedom ends and slavery begins as a drama
of racialized bodies that might have various desired outcomes but is nonetheless unimaginable in terms
other than those of essential racial difference" (32-33).
3
Ibid., 40.
4
Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap P, 2000), 119.
5
Ibid., 117.
6
Ibid., 126-127.
7
Ibid., 117, 112.
8
Ibid., 125-126.
9
Phillis Wheatley, Complete Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta, Penguin Classics (2001), 11-12.
10
Ibid., 12.
11
Ibid., 13.
12
Ibid., 65.
13
Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century
America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990), xi.
14
For the relationship between American revolutionary debates and the debates surrounding the Glorious
Revolution, Benjamin Lewis Price, Nursing Fathers: American Colonists' Conception of English
Protestant Kingship, 1688-1776 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 1999. In, G. W. Sheldon, The Political
Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991) writes: "the liberal natural rights
philosophy, used so effectively by the English in their ideological battles with the Crown, came back to
haunt them one hundred years later when the American colonists used the same approach to destroy the last
vestige of royal supremacy: the traditional ideology of the royal British empire" (22-24).
15
Warner, Letters of the Republic, x.
16
Ibid., 15.
17
Ibid., 11.
140

18
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public
Sphere (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2004), 37-38.. Pateman does not discuss the contract in terms of the
public sphere, but she makes a similar point in her second book: "the 'individual,' 'civil society,' and 'the
public' have been constituted as patriarchal categories in opposition to womanly nature and the 'private'
sphere. . . . [I]n the new world created through contract, everything that lies beyond the domestic (private)
sphere is public, or 'civil,' society" (Pateman 1989 34). She also writes: "The social contract is a modern
patriarchal pact that establishes men's sex right over women, and the civil individual has been constructed
in opposition to women and all that our bodies symbolize" (1989 52)
19
Ibid.
20
Dillon, 2.
21
Dillon, 6.
22
Dillon, 11.
23
Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 1988), 2, 6, 11.
24
Pateman does not consider the role of the child in liberal theory, female or male. She does devote a
chapter to the master-slave relationship in which she discusses early Virgina. However, she does not
discuss race in this context at all. Pateman is somewhat dismissive of the importance of the subjection of
the child to the workings of contract theory. She claims that "sex-right or conjugal right"—not "paternal
right"—is "the original, dimension of patriarchal power" since "A man's power as a father comes after he
has exercised the patriarchal right of a man (a husband) over a woman (wife)" (3). In “The Fraternal Social
Contract," in The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory, (Palo Alto: Stanford
UP, 1989), Pateman does not recognize the child subject as implicated in the subjecthood of adult men. "the
civil body politic is fashioned after the image of the male 'individual' who is constituted through the
separation of civil society from women. This individual has some singular—and largely unrecognized—
aspects precisely because his defining characteristics are thrown into relief only through the contrast with
the womanly nature that has been excluded from civil society" (46). And she goes so far as to say that "The
contract theorists rejected paternal right," which is not a correct statement. Given her model, Pateman
evades the particular subjection of girl children and the way in which children of both sexes are subject to
the authority of wives. We can see this chiasmus in her summary of patriarchal theory: "Both sides agreed .
. . that women (wives) unlike sons, were born and remained naturally subject to men (husbands)" (italics
mine 39).
25
Dillon, 2. Dillon writes: "I now wish to argue that the primary form of constraint, or 'structuration,'
effected in the literary public sphere of the eighteenth century concerns the becoming binary of gender and
the becoming heterosexual of desire: in other words, the structure to which the subject consents (in order to
become a subject) is one that primarily concerns newly configured forms of gender and sexuality" (42-43)
26
Ibid., 2-6.
27
Ibid., 48.
28
Ibid., 3.
29
Little has been written about the black public sphere. See Houston Baker, “Critical Memory and the
Black Public Sphere," in The Black Public Sphere: A Public Culture Book, ed. Black Public Sphere
Collective (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995).
30
Dillon, 18.
141

31
"I believe no one would have published the poetry of Black Phillis Wheatley, that grown woman who
stayed with her chosen Black man. I believe that the death of Suzannah [sic] Wheatley, coincident with the
African poet's twenty-first birthday, signalled, decisively, the end of her status as a child, as a dependent.
From there we would hear from an independent Black woman poet in America. / "Can you imagine that, in
1775? / "Can you imagine that, today? / "America has long been tolerant of Black children, compared to its
reception of independent Black men and Black women." - June Jordan (96)
32
Wheatley solicited Benjamin Franklin's support for a second collection of poetry but did not receive it.
33
Wheatley, Complete Writings, 169.
34
Dillon uses changes in children's clothing as evidence in change in ideology of sexual difference: "The
shift in the ground and meaning of sexual difference from the early modern to the modern period is
succinctly illustrated in the profound transformation in the social coding of sexual difference among
children in the two periods. Phyllis Rackin points out that children in sixteenth-century England were
dressed in skirts until they reached the age of seven because class, rather than gender, was the central
signifier." (12) This use suggests the significance of the political status of childhood in the formation of
gender.
35
Dillon, 46.
36
Ibid., 11.
37
Ibid., 15.
38
The first edition version reads: "It follows according to the natural progression of human things, that the
next stage of that irradiation which our enlighteners are pouring in upon us as [sic] will produce grave
descants on the rights of children." It appears that a typographical error sparked the author (?) to increase
the absurdity of the point by referencing "babies!"
39
Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800
(London: Verso, 1997), 112, 117.
40
Edwin G. Burrows and Michael Wallace, “The American Revolution: The Ideology and Psychology of
National Liberation," Perspectives in American history 6 (1972): 167-308.
41
Burrows & Wallace, 187.
42
Hutcheson, System, 227.
43
Ibid., 192.
44
FN direct quotes for Locke and Hutcheson on parental power reliant on duty
45
Hutcheson, 190. Hutcheson contests Hobbes' argument for children as property and father as absolute
patria potestas.
46
Hutcheson, 188.
47
Ibid., 198.
48
Wylie Sypher, “Hutcheson and the 'Classical' Theory of Slavery," Journal of Negro History 24 (1939):
263.
49
Hutcheson, 92, 200-201, 274.
50
Ibid., 308.
142

51
Burrows & Wallace, 188.
52
Ibid., 189.
53
American Magazine: "The Colonies are yet but Babes that cannot subsist but on the Breasts, and thro'
the Protection of their Mother Country" (1740), quoted in Burrows & Wallace (190). “For the better part of
150 years after Englishmen began to settle America they and their descendants were, in spirit as well as in
fact, wards of the empire. However deeply the New World had altered the rhythms and patterns of their
lives they remained always dependents of England—subject in the end, for better or for worse, to the
authority of a government in which they were not represented and had no direct voice. Still, few would
have had it otherwise. According to the conventional wisdom, the British imperial system corresponded
exactly to a human family, and the American colonies, like young children, could not survive without the
discipline and support of a mature parental power. Rebellion, especially rebellion in the name of self-
determination, was unthinkable" in Burrows & Wallace, 190.
54
Burrows & Wallace, 194.
55
Adams and Mayhew quoted in Burrows & Wallace, 195-196.
56
Filmer: "As long as the first Fathers of Families lived, the name of Patriarchs did aptly belong unto them;
but after a few Descents, when the true Fatherhood it self was extinct, and only the Right of the Father
descends to the true Heir, then the Title of Prince or King was more significant, to express the Power of
him who succeeds only to the Right of that Fatherhood which his Ancestors did Naturally enjoy" (20)
57
Filmer: "To confirm this Natural Right of Regal Power, we find in the Decalogue, That the Law which
enjoyns Obedience to Kings, is delivered in the terms of Honour thy Father, as if all power were originally
in the Father." (23)
58
Filmer 43.
59
Ibid.
60
Tyrrell, 83-84.
61
In next paragraph, add info about otis bio and importance of his pamphlet in revolutionary discourse –
See Bradley]
62
Otis, 4-5.
63
Ibid., 7-8.
64
Otis, 32-49.
65
Otis' explanation of colonial subordination resembles Hutcheson's discussion of the rights of adult
children who choose to live at home.
66
Otis, 41.
67
Ibid., 41-42.
68
See Burrow & Wallace, 194-195: "To underscore the legitimacy of their protests, the colonists
increasingly dwelled on the distinction between childhood and slavery—between a subordination that was
both natural and voluntary and one that was neither."
143

69
It's worth noting that Otis' emphasis on the rights of "white and black" exists alongside his denial of
rights and full humanity to native Americans. He defends the colonists from the British belief that the
colonies are inhabited by "a compound mongrel mixture of English, Indian and Negro." (28) For Otis, "the
modern colonists" are white and black, but not "Indian." They are "the noble discoverers and settlers of a
new world" who have been defending themselves from the natives since the beginning. And these natives,
these "more than brutal men," as the italics suggest, are not fully human. Otis refers to them as "the most
inhuman Salvages, perhaps on the face of the whole earth" (57). They are not "men, citizens, and british
subjects" and not entitled to British or even human rights. Otis' exclusion of native Americans from
equality illustrates that way that inclusion always rides in tandem with exclusion, although the boundaries
of inclusiveness move. Otis quotes Locke: "There is nothing more evident says Mr. Locke, than 'that
creatures of the same species and rank promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature, and the
use of the same faculties, should also be equal one among another, without subordination and subjection."
[italics mine]
70
Otis, 29. Otis' early anti-racism essentially predicts the direction of future racist pro-slavery discourse,
rooted in the body: "No better reasons can be given, for enslaving those of any color than such as baron
Montesquieu has humorously given, as the foundation of that cruel slavery exercised over the poor
Ethiopians; which threatens one day to reduce both Europe and America to the ignorance and barbarity of
the darkest ages. Does it follow that tis right to enslave a man because he is black? Will short curl'd hair
like wood, instead of christian hair, as tis called by those, whose hearts are as hard as the nether millstone,
help the argument? Can any logical inference in favour of slavery, be drawn from a flat nose, a long or a
short face" (29).
71
Otis, 35.
72
For more information about James Otis, see T. H. Breen, “Subjecthood and Citizenship: The Context of
James Otis's Radical Critique of John Locke," New England Quarterly: A Historical Review of New
England Life and Letters 71, no. 3 (1998): 378-403.
73
Sondra O'Neale, “A Slave's Subtle War: Phillis Wheatley's Use of Biblical Myth and Symbol," Early
American Literature 21, no. 2 (1986): 144-65. Dwight A. McBride, Impossible Witnesses: Truth,
Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony (New York: New York UP, 2001). Betsy Erkkila, “Phillis Wheatley
and the Black American Revolution," in A Mixed Race: Ethnicity in Early America, ed. Frank Shuffelton
(New York: Oxford UP, 1993), 225-40.
74
O’Neale, 157.
75
Ibid., 145-150.
76
McBride, 108-117.
77
Erkkila, 228-231.
78
O’Neale 145-147.
79
McBride, 114.
80
Erkkila, 233.
81
Ibid., 238.
82
Chiles, 1399, 1408 1413.
83
Roxann Wheeler, “'Betrayed by Some of My Own Complexion': Cuguano, Abolition, and the
Contemporary Language of Racialism," in Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic, eds.
Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2001).
144

84
Alan Gallay, “Planters and Slaves in the Great Awakening," in Masters and Slaves in the House of the
Lord: Race and Religion in the American South, 1740-1870, ed. John B. Boles (Lexington, KY: UP of
Kentucky, 1988), 20.
85
McBride, 106.
86
Gallay, 35-36.
87
Wheeler, 18-30.
88
Robert Reid-Pharr, “Introduction, or 'Speaking Sweetly of Phillis Wheatley'," in Conjugal Union: The
Body, the House and the Black American, (New York: Oxford UP, 1999), 3-4.
89
Chiles, 1407.
90
Rafia Zafar, “Sable Patriots and Modern Egyptians: Phillis Wheatley, Joel Barlow, and Ann Eliza
Bleecker," in We Wear the Mask: African Americans Write American Literature, 1760-1870, (New York:
Columbia UP, 1997), 26.
91
Zafar, 38.
92
Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century
America (Oxford UP, 1997), 8.
93
Russell Reising, “The Whiteness of the Wheatleys: Phillis Wheatley's Revolutionary Poetics," in Loose
Ends: Closure and Crisis in the American Social Text, (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1996), 82-84. However,
by the end of the article, Reising is also encouraging us to read Wheatley's poems "as coded representations
of the slave's subjection within white culture" and that we must "begin to read her rhetoric as rhetoric—
strategic, subtle, veiled" (112-113).
94
Ibid., 113-114.
95
Ibid., 95.
96
Ibid., 92.
97
Reid-Pharr, 70.
98
Qtd. in Jordan, 212, from Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New-England (1743) by
Charles Chauncy, Pastor of the first Church of Christ in Boston.
99
Quoted in Ari Helo and Peter Onuf, “Jefferson, Morality, and the Problem of Slavery," William and
Mary Quarterly: A Magazine of Early American History and Culture 60, no. 3 (2003): 601.
100
Fliegelman, 1.
101
Ibid., 3.
145
Chapter Two: Black Atlantic Childhood
Here I am the barbarian because they do not understand me. Ovid.
- Epigraph to Rousseau's 1750 Discourse
1

You propose my returning to Africa . . . . Upon my arrival, how like a Barbarian Should I look to
the Natives.
- Phillis Wheatley to Henry Thornton, 1770
2

When I got out of the cabin, and told some of the people what the Lord had done for me, alas!
who could understand me or believe my report! None but to whom the arm of the Lord was
revealed. I became a barbarian to them in talking of the love of Christ . . . .
- The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, 1789

In Phillis Wheatley's body of work, we see some of the earliest literary
instantiations of two co-emergent tropes of the last quarter of the eighteenth-century—the
Romantic Child and Romantic Africa. Wheatley's elegies for children anticipate the child
figure of British Romanticism. Aimed at comforting grieving parents, Wheatley idealizes
childhood as a state worth preserving through death. The elegies emphasize what an early
death spares children, and in the process they constitute an ideal childhood as a state free
from the traumatic experience of becoming an adult. In "On the Death of a young Lady of
Five Years of Age," the speaker refers to the dead child as "Th'enraptured innocent,"
(ll.2) and "Perfect in bliss" in "her heav'nly home" (ll.21), and counsels parents not to
grieve their daughter's loss because she is "Freed from a world of sin, and snares, and
pain" (ll.25-26). The child commemorated in "A Funeral POEM on the Death of C.E. an
Infant of Twelve Months," is a "raptur'd babe" who expresses gratitude for having been
"snatch'd . . . to the skies" (ll.14) before his own corruption:
E'er vice triumphant had possess'd my heart,
E'er yet the tempter had beguil d my heart,
E'er yet on sin's base actions I was bent,
E'er yet I knew temptation's dire intent;
146
E'er yet the lash for horrid crimes I felt,
E'er vanity had led my way to guilt (ll.15-20)

The speaker of "A Funeral POEM" refers to the deceased child as "the happy subject of
my song" to whom "A brighter world, and nobler strains belong" (ll.27-28). Wheatley's
child elegies associate the child voice with a purity, nobility and joy not accorded the
child in Locke, for whom the child is an unformed version of an adult with few positive
qualities other than his or her malleability.
Wheatley also makes use of the early Romantic trope of Africa as a land of
innocence and noble savagery in a 1774 poem published in the Royal American
Magazine, written in response to a poem that had been addressed to her. That poem, "The
Answer [By the Gentleman of the Navy]," refers to Wheatley as "The lovely daughter of
the Affric shore,/ Where every grace, and every virtue join" (ll. 8-9).
3
In Wheatley's
poetic response, "PHILIS'S [sic] Reply to the Answer in our last by the Gentleman in the
Navy," the speaker repeatedly comments on the trope of Africa as a simple, primitive
paradise. She compliments the "Gentleman in the Navy" for his "fair description" and
"Just . . . views of Afric's blissful plain." The poem repeats "The Answer's" reference to
Africa's "artless grottos," emphasizing the continent's uncultivated nature and shady
nooks. Wheatley's poem describes the "pleasing Gambia" that is evoked by "The
Answer" as a fertile pastoral setting where "Eden blooms again" (ll.24). The poem also
refers to Edenic Africa as a "theme" that causes the poet's "sportive fancy [to] play"
(ll.35). Wheatley's "Reply to the Answer" both rehearses the trope of Romantic Africa,
and identifies it as a powerful poetic topos.
147
Wheatley's deployment of the early Romantic concepts of childhood and Africa
can help us to set the literary scene that Olaudah Equiano engaged with the publication of
his Interesting Narrative in 1789. The first and last editions of Equiano's Narrative (1789
and 1794) correspond with the first and last editions of William Blake's Songs of
Innocence and Experience, and a period of early British Romanticism that facilitated
challenges to the hierarchized Lockean binaries that posited the superiority of Europe to
Africa, civilization to savagery, adulthood to childhood, and white pigmentation to black.
Locke had secularized the concept of childhood in the 1690s, incorporating it into
discourses of natural history, epistemology, and political philosophy. By the 1760s, Jean
Jacques Rousseau's rewriting of Locke had infiltrated Anglo-American culture and
troubled Locke's binaries. Equiano and Blake's engagement with the trope of African
childhood illustrate some of the ways that writers deployed both Lockean empiricism and
Rousseauian primitivism to problematize the racial politics undergirding the trade in and
enslavement of Africans and their descendants. Their focus on the character of the
African child allows them to resist the emergent conflation between Africa and the
earliest stages of human civilization, and between Africans of all ages and European
children.
Topos of African Childhood and Scholarship
The topos of childhood in Africa hovers in the margins of scholarship on race in the late
eighteenth-century. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has made Wheatley central to his argument
that literacy—of individuals and of peoples—was a significant indicator of civilization
during the Anglo-American Enlightenment, and that it functioned as a rhetorical site for
148
determining the humanity of black people. In "Phillis Wheatley and the Nature of the
Negro," Gates surveys public reactions to Wheatley's work through 1831 and finds that
Wheatley is consistently read "metonymically" for "the potential of other black people to
assume ‘cultivation.’"
4
In his widely cited "Editor's Introduction" to "Race," Writing, and
Difference, Gates posits Wheatley as a model test case for his claims about literacy as
"the visible sign of reason itself." He refers to Wheatley as "a typical example of Western
culture's use of writing as a commodity to confine and delimit a culture of color." Her
case illustrates Gates' claim that "most Europeans privileged writing—in their writings
about Africans, at least—as the principal measure of the Africans' humanity, their
capacity for progress, their very place in the great chain of being."
5
Although Gates
makes repeated references to Wheatley's youth when describing her 1772 examination by
eighteen elite Bostonians—"the African slave girl," "a young African girl," "the African
adolescent"—he does not theorize the relationship between his thesis about literacy and
figurations of childhood.
Gates' claim about literacy has been widely cited by other scholars, and his
inattention to childhood as the preeminent site of acquiring literacy has also been
repeated. Roxann Wheeler has criticized Gates' thesis for maintaining that the black
person's humanity was seriously questioned by Europeans in the 1780s and 1790s. She
agrees that literacy was an "emblem of civilization" and a "sign of Europe's eminence,"
and that "Afro-British writing was, indeed, used to establish Africans' abilities."
6
But for
Wheeler, the crux of slavery discourse during this period had much less to do with
humanity than with stage of civilization and malleability, and "the benchmarks of
149
polished and savage societies"
7
: How savage were Africans? Could they achieve
civilization, and, if so, how long would it take? I agree that most of the period's writings
on Africans did not dispute their humanity, as much as their level of cultivation.
However, neither Gates nor Wheeler acknowledges the particular complexities of reading
a child subject's achievements as a metonym for the intellectual potential of a race of
people.
The savage-child analogy at the core of Enlightenment and Romantic discourse
conflated two narrative trajectories—child to adult and savage to civilized, or individual
development and species development. This conflation problematized the subjectivity of
the child savage. If savages never reach adulthood, then what is the difference between a
child savage and an adult savage? The topos of African childhood is a site at which
theories of racial difference are both posited and challenged. As Gates scholarship on
Wheatley has illustrated, Enlightenment speculations about racial difference took the
form of debates over the relative influence of nature and culture. Gates links questions
about "the nature of the Negro" to "discussions over 'innate' and 'acquired' mental and
moral qualities of man."
8
But he does not consider the nature/culture debate in light of
contemporary theories about epistemology and the education of children, or recognize
that the debate intersects with racial difference at the site of childhood. Wheeler considers
the way that four stages theory categorizes Africans as savages, but overlooks the
positive valences of savagery during the same period. Both Gates and Wheeler fail
entirely to consider the Romantic cult of primitivism that troubled the perceived
150
superiority of civilization over savagery, adult over child, white skin over black, and
literate over illiterate.
9

Foregrounding late eighteenth-century conceptions of childhood allows us to see
how racial theory maintained a certain fluidity in the early Romantic period. In Locke,
children's responses to disciplinary techniques produced knowledge about human nature.
After Rousseau, children's responses produced knowledge about racial difference. By
Wheatley's era, the extent to which an individual child could become a fully reasoning
adult was seen as evidence of whether or not the child's race could be civilized to
European standards. But at the same time, Rousseau's writings celebrated the states of
savagery and childhood, questioning the superiority of civilization and adulthood. In the
context of a racially inflected and Romanticized discourse of childhood, savagery and
childhood were not simply inferior stages of development to be outgrown. After
Rousseau, the child's responses to education provide a glimpse into a lost "natural" world
of innocence, joy and wisdom associated with savagery and Africa. Africans were
different but not necessarily inferior. Rousseau's anxiety about the impossibility of
separating nature from culture only proliferated such attempts to see in the child the
human past, man in his natural state. In this context, the African child topos was a
doubled representation of primitivism that provided an opportunity to idealize nature, and
to invert Lockean hierarchies of human difference.
Childhood, Experimentation and Empirical Knowledge
In Some Thoughts Concerning Understanding (1693), John Locke establishes the child
character as a site that can provide evidence about human nature at its most fundamental,
151
universal level. He acknowledges that each child has a unique "natural genius and
constitution" and an "original temper," and that each child is therefore somehow marked:
"God has stamped certain characters upon men's minds, which . . . can hardly be totally
altered and transformed."
10
Yet he expresses consistent faith in the child's ability to
produce knowledge about innate versus acquired character traits in "man" in general, in
the abstract. In his childrearing manual, he models the way that narratives about a child's
transformation over time can speak the truth about human nature. Much of Locke's
advice is structured to provide evidence in support of the claims he makes at the
beginning of the manual. For example, Locke repeatedly stresses that children's instinct
to seek pleasure and avoid pain can be manipulated in such a way that the educator can
determine what the child will and will not desire and evade. In terms of appetite, Locke
argues that children's "palates grow into a relish and liking of the seasoning and cookery
which by custom they are set to." Locke insists that the child should be habituated to a
"very plain and simple" diet, and that if this habituation is enforced, the child will enjoy
"a good piece of well-made, and well-baked brown bread, sometimes with and
sometimes without butter or cheese" as much as "greater delicacies." In sum, "if he be
used to it, it will be as pleasant to him."
11
In an effective tautology, Locke thereby
suggests that a hypothetical child's eating behavior provides empirical evidence that
proves what Locke has already argued is true of natural human appetite.
A half-century after Locke's Some Thoughts, the emergent discipline of natural
history deployed the narrative of a child's development to produce knowledge about the
human past. Locke had perpetuated the link between savages and children, but he did not
152
suggest that the child contained evidence about the past of the human species. Rather, the
child produced knowledge about more and less literate societies. There is discursive
overlap between less civilized societies and man's earliest state, but Locke did not
emphasize the connection between children and men in a state of nature. Inspired by the
writing of Comte de Buffon, it was Rousseau who most influentially associated the child
with "natural man," and identified the narrated child's response to disciplinary practices
as a source of evidence about early human history.
Scholarship on the rise of a science of childhood in the late eighteenth century is
in its infant stages. Adriana S. Benzaquén argues that "the history of why and in what
ways Enlightenment philosophers, naturalists and physicians turned their attention to the
child as an object of scientific study . . . remains to be written." Benzaquén charges
scholars with having reduced the debate about childhood in this period to stock
arguments about the child as "evil and corrupted by original sin, naturally good and
innocent, or neutral (blank slate)," and "failing to do justice to the multiplicity of
interests, questions, observations, descriptions and practices enveloping childhood in this
period."
12
In her own work, Benzaquén argues that during the eighteenth century,
inspired by Locke's use of the child as a source of empirical knowledge about innate
ideas, natural historians like Comte du Buffon "began to discern in the study of children a
means to find answers to questions—about human nature, the progress towards
civilization, the development of the faculties and morality."
13
Benzaquén argues that
Buffon is the philosopher who made childhood "indispensable to the history and
definition of the human species." In his attempt to delineate man from animal, Buffon
153
claimed that the length, dependence, and vulnerability of human childhood "is the natural
characteristic" that differentiates the human. Paraphrasing Buffon, Benzaquén writes that
the protracted education required by human childhood "creates the conditions for
humanization (attachment, signs, culture)," and therefore the child "marks the boundary
between animal and human, and stands at the limit between the natural and the
cultural."
14
As a border identity, childhood manifests the traces of the animal in the
human and the natural in the cultural.
Although Rousseau agreed that the narrated child subject produced knowledge
about human nature, he was much less sanguine than Locke about the transparency of the
child as an object of knowledge. In A Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau writes that "it is
no light enterprise to separate that which is original from that which is artificial in man's
present nature, and attain a solid knowledge of a state which no longer exists."
15

Nonetheless, Rousseau offers the narrative of Emile's education as a narrative about
"natural man." Rousseau's goal in the Discourse of Inequality is to show which human
differences are "natural" and which are "solely the product of habit and of the various
ways of life that man adopts in society." This goal is complicated by the fact that, unlike
Locke, Rousseau conflates individual development with species development. In the
"primitive condition" of the state of nature, where "There was neither education nor
progress," all men were savages and like children; "man remained eternally a child."
16
At
the same time, Rousseau inverts the hierarchy that asserts the superiority of civilization
over savagery, later stages of civilization over earlier ones. Representative of Rousseau's
idealized state of nature, the child becomes the repository of a lost human innocence.
154
Rousseau's Emile (1762) inspired parents and educators in Britain and its colonies
to experiment on children in order to produce knowledge about man in a past state of
nature. Within the context of debates about the slave trade and slavery, narratives of
educational experiments involving children provided evidence about human variety and
racial difference in the present. As Wheeler has illustrated, British writers in the last
quarter of the eighteenth-century explained human difference by drawing on a number of
discourses, including climate theory, natural history, and four-stages theory. These
theories emphasized the mutability of man; they "looked to the environment, especially
temperature and terrain, to explain human variation in manners, body, and society." All
of these discourses drew on the child subject for support, and contributed to definitions of
the child. As Wheeler has shown, the "egalitarian impulses" of these fluid theories of
racial difference competed with their "Eurocentric impulse" which asserted "a conviction
of African cultural inferiority" and a "Christian aesthetics" that emphasized the
superiority of Christianity and white skin.
17
Within this framework, the disciplined and
observed black child produced a particular kind of racialized knowledge about African
individuals and African societies that was then deployed to make arguments about the
legitimacy of slavery.
The educated and civilized African child was thought to provide different
information than the European child because the African child was seen as closer to the
savagery of early man. The child born and raised in Africa, the "uncultivated barbarian"
as Wheatley was called,
18
is the "wild child' of the Anglo-American intellectual scene in
that he or she was perceived as having been raised outside of civilization like the children
155
found in the woods of France, and thus to be the rare source of tantalizing evidence about
man in his "natural" state, and about the potential for children "raised in the wild" to
become "civilized." In reference to one of Wheatley's poems, the Royal American
Magazine holds the author up as evidence of human perfectibility: "By this single
instance may be seen, the importance of education." According to the magazine,
Wheatley's accomplishments prove that "Uncultivated nature is much the same in every
part of the globe," and that "Europe and Affrica would be alike savage or polite in the
same circumstances."
19
The magazine is certain that Wheatley began life as a savage
because she is from Africa, and her transformation into a "polite" person is all the more
meaningful because it is so dramatic. The Royal American Magazine uses Wheatley's
case to connect polite society with literacy, challenging racial difference on the level of
the individual body, but re-establishing the "savage" state of Africa. Wheatley's literacy
proves that African individuals and African societies can become civilized. To some, she
is evidence that black skin does not necessarily transmit the savagery of early man across
the generations.
The educated African child could also provide evidence about how black skin did
transmit savagery. In his History of Jamaica (1774), Edward Long asks his readers to
consider his biography of Francis Williams and to decide themselves "whether what they
shall discover of his genius and intellect will be sufficient to overthrow the arguments . . .
to prove an inferiority of the Negroes to the race of white men."
20
Long describes how
Williams, the son of two free Jamaican blacks
a boy of unusual lively parts, was pitched upon to be the subject of an
experiment . . . in order to discover, whether, by proper cultivation, and a
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regular course of tuition at school and the university, a Negroe might not
be found as capable of literature as a white person.
21

Williams was educated in England. As an adult, he wrote a poem in Latin which Long
includes in his history as a "specimen" connected to the Williams "experiment." Long
does not end up leaving his readers to make up their own minds based on the evidence he
provides. He considers Williams' behavior imitative and insane, and calls him "an
unfortunate example, to shew that every African head is not adapted by nature to such
profound contemplations."
22
Long's reading illustrates how complicated it is to draw
conclusions about the species from one "specimen." Long posits that Williams' case says
something about the "Negroes" as a group and the "African head." But it is not clear what
the case proves about the group, other than that not all Africans have the same intellectual
capacities.
Long's reading of William's education signals how significant birthplace and early
childhood were considered when readers attempted to glean information about the group
from the individual. Long considers the Williams experiment to have been misguided
because the boy was not a "native African." He speculates that the more "temperate"
climate of Jamaica "compared with many parts of Guiney" gave Williams an unfair
advantage because "the Northern air imparted a tone and vigour to his organs, of which
they never could have been susceptible in a hot climate."
23
Long's reasoning is conflicted.
By insisting that a better experiment would have involved a native African, Long seems
to be saying that African/"Negro" "inferiority" can be attributed to acquired rather than
inherited traits. On the other, his reading of Williams suggests that even childhood in a
climate conducive to civilization cannot correct for the "inferiority" signaled by black
157
skin, at least not in one lifetime. Long's passage on Williams in his History suggests that
the conflation of individual and group capacity put pressure on the importance of
birthplace and childhood in racializing subjectivity. In the context of natural history, four
stages theory, and the cult of primitivism, the tension between individual and group
development made African childhood a compelling but vexed and unstable site of
information about race in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.
Blake's Little Black Boy
Critical interpretations of William Blake's "The Little Black Boy" have consistently
misread the poem's last stanza in part because they have underestimated the complexity
of the trope of African childhood during the early Romantic era. The poem's black child
narrator concludes his story with the lines:
Ill shade him from the heat till he can bear,
To lean in joy upon our fathers knee.
And then I'll stand and stroke his silver hair,
And be like him and he will then love me. (ll. 25-29)
Critics have assumed that the "him" and "he" of the last line refer to the "little English
boy" in the same way that the same pronouns do in the first line of the stanza. For
example, Dwight McBride argues that the egalitarian impulses of the poem are
undermined by the persistent equation of "humanity with whiteness." To support this
argument, McBride reads the last stanza as saying that the child narrator "will stand and
stroke the English boy's hair 'and be like him' and be loved by him." McBride argues that
this ending emphasizes the "absolute undeniable Otherness" of the black boy; he can
"hope to be like" the English boy, but he "never can . . . actually . . . become the equal of
the little English boy."
24
All readings of this poem that I have come across interpret the
158
ending as McBride does, finding an ineradicable white supremacy in the African child's
perspective.
McBride's reading is not necessarily incorrect, but it reduces the complexity and
ambiguity of the narrator's developmental trajectory. An alternate reading of the poem
exists which undermines the perceived message of white supremacy. The narrator of the
poem could just as easily be claiming that after he has helped the white boy to "lean in
joy" on God, he, the "black boy," will "stand and stroke [God's] silver hair." The "silver"
of the hair suggests old age and wisdom. The pronouns are not capitalized to signal the
deity, but neither is the word "fathers." On this reading, the narrator is saying that at
death, he will be "like" God and loved by God, and he will be standing above and be
superior to the English boy. In this case, the narrator is rejecting the Christian association
between whiteness and proximity to God. We can read the boy's "black bod[y] and sun-
burnt face" as his mother does as evidence that he, unlike the white child, already knows
how to "bear" intimacy with the divine. It is the African child who teaches the English
child to "know" God, and brings him up to a higher level of civilization.
The ambiguity and ambivalence of Blake's poem underscores the unstable
interpretive climate in which narratives of African childhood in the late eighteenth
century acquired meaning. The poem references climate theory, four stages theories, the
power of education, the pastoral nature of African society, and the Christian aesthetics of
color. The adjective "silver" conflates and confuses white and black, old age and youth,
wisdom and ignorance. We can see in this poem, the way that Lockean hierarchized
binaries and the Rousseauean cult of primitivism coexist uneasily in discourse at this
159
moment. Blake's title, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, invokes Romantic
primitivism and Enlightenment empiricism. Are children and savages irrational and
malleable, or essentially good and corruptible? Blake's "Little Black Boy" suggests that
separating nature from culture is as impossible as it is essential to understanding human
difference, and that narratives of African childhood offer tantalizing evidence but
provoke multiple, conflicting interpretations.
Olaudah Equiano and Anthony Benezet
In the mid 1990s, Vincent Carretta discovered documentation that strongly suggested to
him that the author of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or
Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789) had been born in South Carolina,
not Benin, Africa as his narrative claimed. Recently, Carretta has argued that the question
of Equiano's birthplace will probably never be resolved, but that he suspects that Equiano
fabricated his African childhood for rhetorical purposes. In addition, even if Equiano was
born and spent ten years in Africa, as he writes in his narrative, he draws some of his
descriptions of Africa from the antislavery writings of the Quaker Anthony Benezet,
particularly his tract, Some Historical Account of Guinea (1771). In the argument that
follows, I want to build on Carretta's productive focus on the question of what was at
stake for Equiano in claiming an African childhood. While we may never know with any
certainty where in the world and to whom Equiano was born, we can hope to understand
a great deal more about his possible motivations for including two chapters on his
childhood in Africa, and about the sources from which he drew to produce his narrative
of childhood.
160
I argue in this essay that Equiano's narrative deploys the emergent figure of the
African child in transatlantic abolitionist literature to mount an immanent critique of the
Enlightenment epistemology that rationalizes the enslavement of Africans and their
descendants by assigning them the role of representing the inferior end of a white-black
opposition. Aware that contemporaries looked to children raised outside of "civilization"
for knowledge about human nature, Equiano configured his child self as a site for the
production of evidence to prove the cultural relativism of the qualities associated with the
terms of the white/black binary. Giving voice to the (recollected) African child in
Africa—a voice that had recently emerged in anti-slave trade writings—enables
Equiano's Interesting Narrative to stage a significant challenge to the Enlightenment
association of "white" skin with intellectual superiority.
Carretta persuasively argues that the main stake for Equiano in claiming an
African birth is the credibility associated with being an eye-witness to the horrors of the
Atlantic slave trade. According to Carretta, "Equiano recognized that what the opposition
to the slave trade needed in 1789 was not another account of the Middle Passage by a
white observer, but rather testimony from an enslaved African survivor of it."
25
Equiano's
harrowing account of his own kidnapping and transportation to the West Indies could
potentially undermine pro-slave trade claims that slavers only purchased Africans
previously enslaved by just wars, that the conditions on the slave ships were humane, and
that all Africans were better off enslaved by Christians than free in their native land.
Carretta writes:
…. the claim of authenticity by the author of The Interesting Narrative
was quickly recognized by his readers to be fundamental to the
161
effectiveness of the autobiography as a petition against the Atlantic slave
trade. If an African … could attest from personal experience to the cruelty
and inhumanity of the Middle Passage and slavery, he was prima facie
evidence against the major arguments made by contemporaneous
apologists for slavery.
26

I want to extend Carretta's argument to suggest that also crucial to the Interesting
Narratives's interest and effectiveness was its "personal experience" of an Africa and an
African before contact with slavery, from the perspective of a child narrator who lived a
decade in Africa before ever having heard of a white man. Equiano's narrative
complicates the savage-civilized binary by proving that an African can become a British
Christian in one lifetime, but simultaneously undermining the superiority of British
subjectivity. Including the perspective of a child African self in his narrative allows
Equiano to transform his own story into empirical evidence, and to exercise some control
over how the evidence of his transformation from African to European will be
interpreted. With the narrator, readers can ask themselves what Equiano's childhood and
development into an Englishman prove about the civilizational level of African society
and the intellectual capacity of black-skinned people. Arguably, Equiano enhances his
narrative's credibility by claiming specifically that he had not been born and raised from
birth to be a slave.
In the context of debates for and against slavery in the late eighteenth-century, the
question of whether or not a child had been raised with or in slavery had a great deal of
significance. If, as most English speakers believed, childhood experiences played a role
in the kind of adult one could become, then whether one was raised being a tyrant over
slaves or being tyrannized as a slave bore on the question of whether or not slavery
162
should remain legal. Thomas Jefferson's concerns in his Notes (1787) about the impact of
slavery on white children echoed similar concerns expressed by Baron de Montesquieu in
The Spirit of Laws (1748)
27
and by John Woolman in Some Considerations on the
Keeping of Negroes (1762)
28
. Benezet shifts the question from the impact of slavery on
future white adults to its effect on the enslaved themselves, considering the "Bad effects
attendant on slave keeping, as well to the masters as the slaves."
29
Benezet urges readers
not to infer the character of African society or Africans from those enslaved in the West
Indies and the American South. He wants those who might doubt his positive descriptions
of Africa and his "account relating to the natural capacity and good disposition of the
inhabitants of Guinea" to consider that the Africans they have met have been mentally
deformed by being enslaved:
Let them consider, that those afflicted strangers, though in an enlightened
Christian country, have yet but little opportunity or encouragement to
exert and improve their natural talents: They are constantly employed in
servile labour …. [F]ew of [the Negroes] having any reasonable prospect
of any other than a state of slavery; so that, though their natural capacities
were ever so good, they have neither inducement or opportunity to exert
them to advantage: This naturally tends to depress their minds, and sink
their spirits into habits of idleness and sloth, which they would, in all
likelihood, have been free from, had they stood upon an equal footing with
white people.
30

Benezet underscores the importance of the narratives of Africans who
experienced a life of freedom in Africa before being kidnapped into slavery. He begins
his first chapter by warning that judging all "Negroes" by the behavior of those "in their
present abject state of slavery, broken spirited and dejected," will inevitably lead
observers to see blacks as "incapable of improvement, destitute, miserable, and insensible
of the benefits of life." Benezet counters this misreading with his "impartial enquiry"
163
which finds that Africans live in "innocent simplicity" and are "a humane, sociable
people, whose faculties are as capable of improvement as those of other people."
31
He
recommends gathering information from "those who are capable of reflection, before
they were brought from their native land."
32
Benezet includes the stories of two enslaved
African men who describe having been violently and permanently separated from their
wives and children. Benezet does not, however, deploy the African subject to provide
knowledge about African society (as Equiano does). He does complain that the
information English speakers have about Africa is unreliable because it is produced by
supporters of the slave trade who are biased. They are "persons engaged in the trade,
who, from self interested views, have described them in such colours as were least likely
to excite compassion and respect."
33
Benezet's tract suggests that the nature of Africans in
Africa was a central question in debates about slavery, and that the question of whether
"Negro" traits were inherited or acquired provided a discursive context for ongoing
speculation about racial difference, particularly about whether or not Africans and their
descendants were innately inferior to Europeans and their descendants, and therefore
suited to slavery.
Equiano and Locke
I think we may observe, that, when children are first born, all objects of sight that do not hurt the
eyes, are indifferent to them; and they are no more afraid of a blackamoor or a lion, than of their
nurse or a cat. . . .
-- Locke, Some Thoughts on Education
The child certainly knows, that the nurse that feeds it is neither the cat it plays with, nor the
blackmoor it is afraid of ….
-- Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding

164
While scholars continue to disagree vigorously about Locke's beliefs about racial
difference and about his influence on subsequent thinking about the meaning of dark
pigmentation, we can note, as perhaps Equiano did, that Locke's Essay can be read to
suggest that ideas of human difference are often based more on custom imbibed in early
childhood, than on experience. In the 608-page Essay, Locke discusses Africans three
times, and all three times occur in the context of a discussion about children's
perceptions. The first mention occurs early in the Essay. In elaborating on his claim that
humans are not born with a grasp of "general maxims," Locke writes: "The child
certainly knows that the nurse that feeds it is neither the cat it plays with, nor the
Blackmoor it is afraid of" (24). Here, the child's fear of the "Blackmoor" signals his
ability to reason.
34

The second two references to black skin in the Essay occur towards the end, in
one long and confusing hypothetical anecdote about an English boy child who "can
demonstrate ... that a negro is not a man," based on the fact that "white colour was one of
the constant simple ideas of the complex idea he calls man." Having "framed the idea of
man," in England, Locke's child has learned from his environment that all men are "white
or flesh-colour." Locke is attempting to illustrate that the child's reasoning about human
difference does not reflect innate knowledge of general maxims such as "It is impossible
for the same thing to be and not to be." Rather, the child draws on, "the clear, distinct
perception he hath of his own simple ideas of black and white, which he cannot be
persuaded to take, nor can ever mistake one for another, whether he knows that maxim or
165
no."
35
Having been raised to believe that all men are white, the child can reason that "the
negro is not a man" simply based on "his own simple ideas of black and white."
In this scene, Locke presents a hypothetical scenario involving an apparently
universal "child," a "Negro," a painting of a white man, and an invisible interrogator
(Locke? the narrator?) who asks the child whether or not the "Negro" is a "man."
First, a child having framed the idea of a man, it is probable that his idea is
just like that picture which the painter makes of the visible appearances
joined together; and such a complication of ideas together in his
understanding makes up the single complex idea which he calls man,
whereof white or flesh-colour in England being one, the child can
demonstrate to you that a negro is not a man, because white colour was
one of the constant simple ideas of the complex idea he calls man; and
therefore he can demonstrate, by the principle, It is impossible for the
same thing to be and not to be, that a negro is not a man; the foundation of
his certainty being not that universal proposition, which perhaps he never
heard nor thought of, but the clear, distinct perception he hath of his own
simple ideas of black and white, which he cannot be persuaded to take, nor
can ever mistake one for another, whether he knows that maxim or no.
(Book IV, Chapter VII, §16)
With two significant exceptions, the scholars who have analyzed the above scene
have argued that Locke is trying to suggest that only a child would mistake a Negro for a
subhuman being. For William Uzgalis, "Locke holds that it is both childish and
dangerous to claim that a Negro is not a man."
36
Robin Blackburn writes that Locke
"regarded any attempt to exclude Negroes from the human race as a childish delusion."
37

I read this scene as a resonant discursive moment in the genealogy of Anglo-American
childhood, through which we can begin to grasp the entanglement of the discourses of the
"child" and of the "Negro" at the dawn of the long eighteenth century. It illustrates the
interdependence of Enlightenment notions of childhood, race, humanity, and reason.
Locke is narrating, if not endorsing, the subjectivity of the liberal white English male.
166
Read in context, this passage figures the white, English, male child as essentially correct
about the whiteness of man and the inhumanity of blacks, and, further, that his correct
reading of the Negro's inhumanity is what qualifies him as a reasoning human. His
reasoning produces the white child and ageless Negro as mutually exclusive categories.
The process of human subject formation is impossible for the nonwhite child, who is the
object, not the subject of the imperial gaze.
The scene narrates and reifies the attachment of the white-black binary to English
and Africans respectively that was taking place at that time in British culture. Using his
reason, the child condenses "flesh-colour" into whiteness, and "Negro" into blackness.
The child gains subjectivity in the same process that reduces all people from a vast
continent and beyond to unspecified inhuman "Negros." In her study of race in early
modern England, Hall writes that "the binarism of black and white might be called the
originary language of racial difference in English culture." The "evocation of blackness
served to racialize whiteness and make it visible." Locke exploited this binarism and its
attendant "possibilities . . . for the representation and categorization of perceived physical
differences." Locke contributes to the late seventeenth century trend in which "color had
become the primary organizing principle around which the natural historian classified
human differences."
38
In narrating this scene, Locke participates in what Robyn Wiegman
calls "the appropriations and significations of the body as the determinative site of visible
differences" that is so central to Western racial discourse. For Wiegman, "the production
of the African subject as non- or subhuman, as an object or property, arises . . . according
to the epistemologies attending vision and their logics of corporeal inscription: making
167
the African 'black' reduces the racial meanings attached to flesh to a binary structure of
vision." The Enlightenment visual economy deployed by Locke "collapses social
subjectivity with skin and marks an epidermal hierarchy as the domain of natural
difference."
39

Locke's suggestion that the child received his idea of man from a portrait invokes
a genre of late seventeenth century British portraiture in which aristocratic men were set
off as white and civilized in contrast with the inclusion of a black attendant. This genre
reflects "the ongoing commodification of black bodies as England becomes more
dependent on an involvement with Africa for economic expansion and symbolic
definition."
40
The portraits helped to construct aristocratic English identity as white; the
"black skin" of Africans, often brought to England when young, enslaved and renamed,
"becomes a key signifier . . . associated with wealth and luxury, it is the necessary
element for the fetishization of white skin, the 'white mask' of aristocratic identity."
41

Locke's boy is comparing the Negro to the portrait of a man whose whiteness has already
been constructed against the definition of the black person as a subhuman and a
commodity. The Negro is an essential presence "to render whiteness visible." The
presence of the black colonial slave constructs white imperial identity.
Equiano's Narrative
Equiano's Interesting Narrative was also one of the first texts to deploy the African child
character to challenge the association between dark skin and intellectual inferiority. He
positioned his earlier child self as one for whom white men were terrifying. This trope
inverts the Lockean truism of the white child's terror at the sight of a black person.
42
In
168
his popular travel narrative, A Voyage to Senegal, the Isle of Goree, and the River
Gambia (1759), Michel Adanson performs this inversion: "It came into my head, that my
colour, so opposite to the blackness of the Africans, was the first thing that struck the
children: those poor little creatures were then in the same case as our own infants, the
first time they see a Negroe.’"
43
Adanson was cited by Benezet and others writing against
the slave trade because of his positive descriptions of life in Africa.
Equiano may also have been elaborating on a passage in Belinda's Petition that
argued that her childhood would have been one of "the most complete felicity" if she
hadn't been terrified by the threat of being kidnapped by white people,
had not her mind received early impressions of the cruelty of men, whose
faces were like the moon . . . . The idea of these, the most dreadful of all
enemies, filled her infant slumber with horror, and her noon-tide moments
with cruel apprehensions!
Five years before Equiano published his narrative, a 1782 legal petition by a former slave
named Belinda that was reprinted in the 1787 issue of the American Museum, featured
recollections of an African childhood—"she had twelve years enjoyed the fragrance of
her native grove"—in an effort to convince the court that she deserved a portion of her
master's confiscated estate. The petition claims that Belinda is the first native African to
recount her anguish at being separated from her parents, an "agony, which many of her
country's children have felt, but which none have ever described." Although the writings
of Wheatley suggest that Belinda was not the first to describe her kidnapping in Africa by
slave traders, her petition was the first prose narrative to feature an extended recollection
of a childhood in Africa to argue against the slave trade. In the cases of Adanson's travel
narrative and Belinda's legal petition, the terrified reaction of young African children to
169
white men suggests the cultural relativism of the qualities associated with "white" and
"black" skin. Equiano's text takes the trope of the African child frightened by whites
further by using it to challenge the empirical epistemology that grounds white supremacy.
Equiano's Interesting Narrative challenges the logic that connects white skin to
superiority. His narrative seeks to "remove the prejudice that some conceive against the
natives of Africa on account of their colour."
44
He writes that, "in regard to complexion,
ideas of beauty are wholly relative. I remember while in Africa to have seen three negro
children, who were tawny, and another quite white, who were universally regarded by
myself, and the natives in general, as far as related to their complexions, deformed."
45

Equiano deploys the African child voice here and elsewhere in the narrative to suggest
that a mind that has not been molded by exposure to the Christian religion and the
prejudices of Europeans will not associate whiteness with superiority or goodness or
salvation. Rather, as Locke suggests, a tabula rasa mind will base its understanding of the
white man on experience—and in the case of Equiano, the experience is far from
positive. Equiano's experiences with whites leads his child self to conclude—
temporarily—that white people are representative of the forces of evil.
The scene in which the child-Equiano first encounters white men occurs in
Chapter II of the Interesting Narrative. Equiano introduces his child-self as a Lockean
child who is shaped by his environment. With regard to "the manners and customs of my
country," Equiano writes: "They had been implanted in me with great care, and made an
impression on my mind, which time could not erase."
46
It is this impressionable youth
formed by his experiences who describes the first white men he has ever seen:
170
The first object which saluted my eyes when I arrived on the coast was the
sea, and a slave ship, which was then riding at anchor, and waiting for its
cargo. These filled me with astonishment, which was soon converted into
terror when I was carried on board. . . . I was now persuaded that I had
gotten into a world of bad spirits, and that they were going to kill me.
Their complexions too differing so much from ours, their long hair, and
the language they spoke, (which was very different from any I had ever
heard) united to confirm me in this belief. . . . I asked [some black people]
if we were not to be eaten by those white men with horrible looks, red
faces, and loose hair.
47

Considered together, Locke's conflations of racial difference with child perception
provide a framework for understanding Equiano's child-self. If judgments about human
nature are based on custom, including early experiences of terror, than they do not reflect
an experiential truth about racial difference. Theoretically, the humanity of Africans can
thus be separated from the Eurocentric color-coding system that has established
whiteness as the norm of full humanity, and blackness as an indicator of the absence of
full humanity. Locke's child believes in African inferiority because he has imbibed his
views from his environment, and he has been raised in a community that believes in
African inferiority. Unlike his literary precursors, Equiano emphasizes that his child
perception that whites are inhuman spirits reflects purely his own experience rather than
custom, allowing him to underscore the notion that judgments of human differences
based on "complexion" are entirely conventional, and not at all natural. In the process,
Equiano challenges the Enlightenment faith in "the simple ideas of black and white" that
are grounded in part in the English child's irrational fear of the African.
Unlike his literary predecessors, Equiano emphasizes a child-consciousness that is
free from fear of white people. Belinda's Petition suggests that her fear of white people
dated from her infancy. "The idea of [white people], the most dreadful of all enemies,
171
filled her infant slumber with horror, and her noon-tide moments with cruel
apprehensions!" Cugoano also claims that his fear of white people predates his actual
encounter with them. Seeing "several white people . . . made me afraid that they would
eat me, according to our notion, as children, in the inland parts of the country."
48
In
general, then, these early representations of African childhood fear of white people mirror
the English children's fear of the "Blackmoor."
However, Equiano's narrative does not repeat this inverted trope in the same way.
Rather he clarifies that, as a child, he "had never heard of white men or Europeans." He
had noticed that humans even in Africa come in a range of pigmentary hues—"I
remember while in Africa to have seen three negro children, who were tawny, and
another quite white"—and he admits that he, like his community, find the lighter-skinned
Africans "deformed." However, Equiano reserves all moral judgment until he encounters
white people who behave and treat him horribly. At this moment, his narrative
underscores the inhumanity of the whites by attributing cannibalistic practices to them.
Presumably without Cuguano's exposure to adult stories about whites who eat Africans,
Equiano concludes from his senses, not narrative, that they epitomize human barbarity.
Mark Stein observes that Equiano's narrative wields the "powerful trope" of cannibalism
as a "potent rhetorical weapon" to invert the binary that assigns "civilization" to
Europeans, and "savagery" to Africans.
49
Equiano performs a "reading of phenotypic
features, which in colonial discourse mark out Africans as barbaric" on the Europeans,
thus reversing the cannibalism trope. As Stein points out, in the scene in which Equiano
first sees white people, "the one-sided reading of the signification of African
172
physiognomy is unsettled and relativized by performing a reading of European
physiognomy."
50
I want to suggest that the implications of this inversion—that white
people are the real "savages"—are underscored by Equiano's creation of a child self that
bases its perceptions of Europeans on experience rather than opinion, and his deployment
of his child-self as evidence of the relativism of the meanings of color. Unlike the
Englishman whose dehumanization of Africans has been influenced by childhood
exposure to scary stories about Blackmoors, Equiano has been influenced by childhood
sensory exposure to white slave traders. His narrated child-self produces evidence that
there is no natural association between Europeans and civilization, or between Africans
and savagery.
Equiano's adult acceptance late in the narrative of white people as friends and a
white woman as a wife further supports his claims about the relativity of judgments about
human nature based on skin color, and underscores his ongoing ability to revise his
opinions to accommodate his experiences. Like Locke's English child, the protagonist of
Equiano's Interesting Narrative, exercises his capacity to reason during his childhood and
during his adult life. In addition to grounding his critique of white superiority, Equiano's
African child figure ensures that the adult Equiano will not be written off as someone
whose habits of reasoning were shaped in slavery, and whose eyewitness testimony is
therefore necessarily suspect. Like his contemporaries, Equiano argued that slavery
deformed African subjectivity. "Does not slavery itself depress the mind, and extinguish
all its fire and every noble sentiment?," Equiano asks in the Interesting Narrative.
51
In the
discursive community in which Equiano wrote, narrating a childhood as a slave in South
173
Carolina would have sabotaged any attempt to present his adult self as credible. In
contrast, Equiano's skilful manipulation of African child consciousness contributed
immensely to his narrative's ability to serve as evidence for equal African reasoning
capacity, and thus full African humanity.
174
Endnotes

1
See the "Editorial Notes" in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge UP, 1997): "Rousseau slightly altered a verse Ovid (43 BC-AD 18)
wrote while exiled among the Sarmatians, a tribe closely related to the Scythians. Just as the sophisticated
poet from Imperial Rome felt that the Sarmations took him for a barbarian, so Rousseau expected
sophisticated ancient régime France to mistake his defense of austere republican virtue for a defense of
barbarism. In the event he was not proved wrong." Rousseau used this as an epigraph in several other
writings.
2
Phillis Wheatley, Complete Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta, Penguin Classics (2001), 159.
3
Ibid., 85.
4
Gates, Jr., Henry Louis, “[Phillis Wheatley and the Nature of the Negro]," in Critical Essays on Phillis
Wheatley, ed. William H. Robinson (Boston: Hall, 1982), 225.
5
Gates, Jr., Henry Louis, ed., 'Race,' Writing and Difference (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985), 8-9.
6
Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British
Culture (U of Pennsylvania P, 2000), 238.
7
Ibid., 239.
8
Gates, “Phillis Wheatley," 220.
9
Childhood, education, race, stage of society, and primitivism come together in the following quote from
the Royal American Magazine (1774): "By this single instance may be seen, the importance of education.—
Uncultivated nature is much the same in every part of the globe. It is probable Europe and Affrica would be
alike savage or polite in the same circumstances; though, it may be questioned, whether men who have no
artificial wants, are capable of becoming so ferocious as those, who by faring sumptuously every day, are
reduced to a habit of thinking it necessary to their happiness, to plunder the whole human race." Quoted in
Wheatley, Complete Writings, 83.
10
Locke, Some Thoughts, 41.
11
Ibid., 16-17.
12
Adriana S. Benzaquén, “Childhood, Identity and Human Science in the Enlightenment," History
Workshop Journal, no. 57 (2004): 35-36.
13
Adriana S. Benzaquén, “Childhood, History, and the Sciences of Childhood," in Multiple Lenses,
Multiple Images: Perspectives on the Child across Time, Space and Disciplines, eds. Hillel Goelman,
Sheila K. Marshall, and Sally Ross (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2004), 24.
14
Ibid., 42-43.
15
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality, ed. Maurice Cranston, Penguin Classics, 68.
16
Ibid., 105.
17
Roxann Wheeler, “'Betrayed by Some of My Own Complexion': Cuguano, Abolition, and the
Contemporary Language of Racialism," in Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic, eds.
Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2001), 18.
18
William H. Robinson, ed., Critical Essays on Phillis Wheatley (Boston: Hall, 1982): 19.
175

19
Wheatley, Complete Writings, 83.
20
Edward Long, History of Jamaica, 475.
21
Ibid., 476.
22
Ibid.
23
Ibid., 477.
24
Dwight A. McBride, Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony (New York: New
York UP, 2001, 59-62. For a similar reading, see Alan Richardson, “Colonialism, Race, and Lyric Irony in
Blake's 'the Little Black Boy'," Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of
Language and Literature 26, no. 2 (1990): 233-48.
25
Vincent Carretta, “Introduction," in The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings by John Locke,
Penguin Classics (1996), xiv.
26
Vincent Carretta, “Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa?: New Light on an Eighteenth-Century Question
of Identity," Slavery & Abolition [Great Britain] 20, no. 3 (1999): 98.
27
Montesquieu argues that the slave master "contracts with his slave all sorts of bad habits, insensibly
accustoms himself to want all moral virtue; becomes haughty, hasty, hard-hearted, passionate, voluptuous,
and cruel" (qtd. in Benezet 174).
28
Focusing particularly on young children, the Quaker John Woolman echoes the Lockean language of
habituation in his warning in Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes (1762) that the "conduct [of
slave masters] striking the minds of their children, whilst young, leaves less room for that which is good to
work upon them. The customs of their parents, their neighbors, and the people with whom they converse,
working upon their minds, and they from thence conceiving wrong ideas of things, and modes of conduct,
the entrance into their hearts becomes in a great measure shut up against the gentle movings of uncreated
purity.... From one age to another the gloom grows thicker and darker, till error gets established by general
opinion …." (qtd. in Benezet n74, 174).
29
Benezet, 173.
30
Benezet, 198. Benjamin Rush says something similar in his tract. He counsels his readers "to distinguish
between an African in his own country, and an African in a state of slavery in America" because "Slavery is
so foreign to the human mind, that the moral faculties, as well as those of the understanding are debased,
and rendered torpid by it" (4-5).
31
Benezet, 1-2.
32
Ibid., 199.
33
Ibid., 98.
34
For an overview of English-speaking children's induced fear of the Blackmoor, see Daniel A. Cohen,
“Social Injustice, Sexual Violence, Spiritual Transcendence: Constructions of Interracial Rape in Early
American Crime Literature, 1767-1817," William and Mary Quarterly 56, no. 3 (1999): 481-5. He writes:
"By the time American printers issued their first execution sermons during the late seventeenth century, the
protoracist image of the black man as a cruel ravisher or murderer of white women and children was
already embedded in popular English print culture" (489).
35
Locke, Essay, 518-519.
176

36
William Uzgalis, “'An Inconsistency Not to Be Excused': On Locke and Racism," in Philosophers on
Race: Critical Essays, eds. Julie K. Ward and Tommy L. Lott (Oxford, England: Blackwell, 2002), 84.
37
Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800
(London: Verso, 1997), 329.
38
Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca:
Cornell UP, 1995), 2-4, 22-24.
39
Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995), 3-
4, 8-9.
40
Hall, Things of Darkness, 227.
41
Ibid., 211.

43
Quoted in Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 244.
44
Ibid., 45.
45
Ibid., 38.
46
Ibid., 46.
47
Ibid., 55.
48
Cugoano, 149.
49
Mark Stein, “Who's Afraid of Cannibals? Some Uses of the Cannibalism Trope in Olaudah Equiano's
Interesting Narrative," in Discourses of Slavery and Abolition: Britain and Its Colonies, 1760-1838, eds.
Brycchan Carey, Markman Ellis, and Sara Salih (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 97.
50
Ibid., 98.
51
Equiano, 46.
177
Chapter Three: Early National Childhood
The rights of man have been discussed, till we are somewhat wearied with the discussion. To
these have been opposed with more presumption than prudence the rights of woman. It follows
according to the natural progression of human things, that the next stage of that irradiation which
our enlighteners are pouring in upon us as will produce grave descants on the rights of children.
-- Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, 1
st
ed. (1799)

The rights of man have been discussed, till we are somewhat wearied with the discussion. To
these have been opposed, as the next stage in the progress of illumination, and with more
presumption than prudence, the rights of woman. It follows according to the natural progression
of human things, that the next influx stage of that irradiation which our enlighteners are pouring
in upon us as will produce illuminate the world with grave descants on the rights of youth, on
the rights of children, on the rights of babies!
-- Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, 5
th
ed. (1800)

The difference between the fifth and first editions of Hannah More's Strictures signals the
way in which child discourse was shifting at the end of the eighteenth century. The
discourse of education refined an enlightenment taxonomy of developmental stages in
children initiated by John Locke. British educators emphasized age and gender difference
in the period's emerging discipline of "infant science," the proliferation of child
disciplinary strategies, and the production of literature designed specifically for child
readers, often within specific age ranges. The same writers also participated in the
discourses of slavery and race that flourished in England in the wake of the American
Revolution. They participated in the production of a Romanticized African subject who
was both ageless and child-like. The complicated developmental trajectory of the African
subject in Equiano and Blake was replaced by the static mind and stage of civilization of
the African subject of abolitionist poetry. The British child capable of intellectual
development emerged in tandem with the African frozen in an infant state. The figure of
the transforming African child subject who troubles the hierarchies of white and black,
178
European and African, civilized and savage is essentially silenced for some two decades,
until the late 1820s, replaced by the noble African child-like savage. In educational
discourse, the white child is presumed to be moldable into a near perfect human, whose
humanity is measured in part by his or her ability to recognize that the African individual
is inferior to the Englishman (and to the British-American) and incapable of comparable
intellectual growth because of his kinship to Africa.
In didactic abolitionist literature, the ambiguity and subversion of Equiano and
Blake's deployment of the African child were resolved by a static stereotype, symbolized
by the supplicant African. In his reading of "The Little Black Boy," Alan Richardson
emphasizes the poem's radical potential, the way that it provides a "discursive site for
opposition and a rare lesson in dissent" that sets it apart from other children's literature,
such as Ann Taylor's "The Little Negro."
1
Richardson writes that Blake's poem counters
the representation "of the typical African of most children's and popular literature," and
counters the "constant" of abolitionist poetry: "the African is first and foremost an
uncivilized ‘savage,’ childlike and ‘unenlightened.’"
2
However, Taylor published the
collection of Rhymes for the Nursery that contained "The Little Negro," in 1806,
seventeen years after Songs of Innocence and Experience. Arguably, earlier anti-slavery
verse in general, like Blake's, contained a more complex African subject. For example,
Timothy Dwight's long anti-slavery poem, Greenfield Hill (1794), contains a section
entitled, "Effects of Slavery on the African, from his childhood through life." This
passage narrates the developmental trajectory an American slave, from "the Afric infant,"
"fresh to life," through his being "Condition'd as a brute," to his intellectual deformation
179
("To sour, and stupid, sinks his active mind.") Anne Yearsley's Poem on the Inhumanity
of the Slave-Trade (1788), cited by Richardson as evidence for his argument, emphasizes
the fatherhood of her African subject, a circumstance that signals the fact that not all
Africans are children. In the late 1790s, the proliferation of abolitionist literature
designed for children and the lower-classes ushered in a collapsed, unidimensional
African subject.
Abolitionist literature was trans-Atlantic both before and after the American
Revolution in that writers in both England and America read and responded to each
other's work. Abolitionist literature for children, however, though consumed across the
Atlantic, was mostly produced by English writers through the 1820s. This fact perhaps
has been partly responsible for the claim that Romanticism does not emerge in American
abolitionist literature until the 1830s. In his work on trans-Atlantic abolitionist discourse,
Dwight McBride sets the dates of 1789-1832 for British Romanticism and 1835-1865 for
"literary Romanticism" in the United States (18). In general, scholarship on American
abolitionism begins with the rise of immediatism in the 1830s. The tendency of scholars
working on childhood and race has been to focus on the writings of Lydia Maria Child,
Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and other educational reformers of the 1830s and 1840s.
3

What the periodization of American anti-slavery writing often overlooks is the
implementation of gradual emancipation policies in the middle-Atlantic states between
1790 and the mid-1820s and the associated colonizationist movement in the States,
marked by the birth of the American Colonization Society in 1816.
180
There is no question that British early-nineteenth century children's literature
influenced American abolitionism of the mid-1820s and beyond, but we can also see the
influence of the British Romanticization of white children and Africans as early as 1816
in the pro-colonizationist tract of Philadelphian Jesse Torrey. In her article, "The Mind of
a Child: Images of Africans Americans in Early Juvenile Fiction," Sarah Roth finds the
origins of "the black slave in American literary culture" in British children's literature
beginning in the early nineteenth century, and American children's literature beginning in
the 1820s. For Roth, the 1820s is when "white authors for the first time fashioned black
characters who displayed above all else a childlike docility and a heartfelt devotion to
their white benefactors" that "undercut the manhood of black men." For Roth, children's
literature after 1820 on both sides of the Atlantic taught child readers "what it meant to be
white" and "legitimate[d] the denial of manly privileges of political and legal equality to
African American men in the North."
4
Roth speculates that the children's fiction that
"equated black men and women with children . . . . endowing black characters of all ages
with childlike qualities" was aimed at "mak[ing] it easier for young white readers to
identity with people of a different race whose lifestyles were foreign to most British and
American children." Unfortunately, this strategy had a downside; it "fostered in white
children condescension toward people with black skin and a corresponding feeling of
inferiority over them."
5
Arguably, Roth's claims about the racism produced by children's
literature are also true about Torrey's tract, indicating that the origins of the American
black literary subject can be found earlier in American literature than the 1820s.
181
Roth's conflation of British and American children's literature, as if the two were
the same except for chronology, correctly identifies a trans-Atlantic white child subject
produced by this literature in contrast with the childlike African. However, it evades the
way in which the cultural work of this didactic fiction may have operated differently in
America than in England. After all, the lifestyles of black people were much less
"foreign" to American than to British children. In his work on the cultural differences
between British and American abolitionist verse, Marcus Wood writes that "American
abolition writing focuses far more on what is a homegrown institution. . . . In England the
abolitionists were fighting a phenomenon that had no significant manifestation on the
British mainland."
6
My reading of Torrey's tract suggests that early American
colonizationists popularized the British image of the noble child-like African in order to
underscore their message that Africans and their descendants could not be assimilated
into, and thus did not belong in, American society. Read in an American context, British
children's literature from the late 1790s encouraged young inhabitants of the Northern
states, many of whom had daily intercourse with enslaved and free blacks, to see all
African-Americans as hopelessly "foreign" to the early American republic.
"Extravasat Blood": Slavery and Racial Essentialism
It is most certain that all Men, as they are the Sons of Adam, are Coheirs; and have equal Right
unto Liberty, and all other outward Comforts of Life. . . .
Few can endure to hear of a Negro's being made free; and indeed they can seldom use their
freedom well; yet their continual aspiring after their forbidden Liberty, renders them Unwilling
Servants. And there is such a disparity in their Conditions, Color & Hair, that they can never
embody with us, and grow up into orderly Families, to the Peopling of the Land: but still remain
in our Body Politick as a kind of extravasat Blood.
Samuel Sewall, The Selling of Joseph: A Memorial (1700)
182
The Selling of Joseph: A Memorial, a three-page anti-slavery pamphlet published
in Boston in 1700, is an extraordinary document. Written by Quaker lawyer, Samuel
Sewall, the pamphlet makes an unequivocal and concise argument against slavery, within
twelve years of the earliest known anti-slavery protest in the North American colonies (in
1688), and over three-quarter century before colonists first started debating in earnest the
legitimacy of slavery.
7
Sewall's pamphlet rehearses and then systematically rebuts
common claims made in the northern states in favor of colonial slavery, drawing from a
motley Enlightenment discursive arsenal, including Biblical exegesis, Christian
egalitarianism, republican natural rights rhetoric, and international trade law. At the same
time, however, Sewall improvises an early theory of racial difference in the language of
sanguinity to support his claim that "Whites" and "Negroes"/"Africans" cannot coexist as
equal members of the same society. Sewall either cannot imagine or cannot tolerate
marriage alliances between "Negro men" and "our Daughters," and he insists that all
"Africans" in the colonies are like blood that cannot be contained in the vessels of the
political body. While Sewall endorses Enlightenment universality in his stance against
slavery, he simultaneously elaborates a discourse of racial essentialist particularity that
obstructs social integration on terms of equality between former slaveowners and former
slaves.
Sewall's rhetorical mix of universalism when it comes to slavery and racial
essentialism when it comes to social integration prefigures the discourse of slavery and
race dominant in the Northern colonies in the decades following the Declaration of
Independence. This essay argues that early nineteenth-century Northern antislavery
183
rhetoric adapted a British Romantic abolitionist discourse of Africanity to explain the
necessity and promise of emancipating American slaves gradually and sending them to
Africa to cultivate its resources for national profit. The literary romanticization of Africa
stereotyped the vast continent as the "land of childhood" and the "African" as a perpetual
child. The associated discourse of racial essentialism linked all Africans and their
descendants as similarly childlike--inassimilable, incapable of education for self-
government and national belonging, and well-suited to agricultural labor. Northern
colonization rhetoric masked the ways in which the articulation and implementation of
gradual emancipation policies pivoted on the exploitation of the labor of African-
American children, and relegated generations of Northern blacks to the status of
permanent "foreigners."
The contemporary notion that slavery in the Early Republic was a Southern
phenomenon, that it ceased to exist in the Northern states in the wake of the Revolution,
has obscured the fact that gradual emancipation policies in the middle-Atlantic states
extended Northern slavery into the 1830s and produced an essentialist racist discourse
that is evident in the abolitionist rhetoric of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). In this article, I
chart the shifts in Pennsylvanian emancipation rhetoric between the 1780 Act for the
Gradual Abolition of Slavery, and Jesse Torrey's 1816 pamphlet, A Portraiture of
Domestic Slavery, which supported the establishment of the American Colonization
Society. The 1780 Act promoted gradual emancipation of the slave population, and total
political and social equality in Pennsylvania for freed slaves. Torrey's pamphlet promoted
gradual emancipation, but insisted on the impossibility of integrating freed slaves and the
184
necessity of colonizing them beyond national borders. To ground its claims, A
Portraiture deploys British abolitionist literary tropes of Africa and Africans found in the
educational writings of Sarah Trimmer, Maria Edgeworth, James Montgomery, Amelia
Opie, Priscilla Wakefield, and others, whose goal was to support settlements in Africa for
freed slaves from Britain's West Indian colonies. The implementation of Pennsylvania's
gradual emancipation law created real social inequities between the enslavers and the
enslaved which were then explained by a British Romantic discourse of essential racial
difference between "whites" and "Africans" that necessitated colonization of Africans in
the diaspora "back" to Africa.
Lockean Malleability and Race
The late seventeenth-century writings of British philosopher John Locke replaced the
notion of original sin with the apparatus of the blank page, transforming the child figure
from a stain-soaked soul in need of redemption into an empty mind waiting to be
inscribed. Locke shifted emphasis away from mitigating the child's inescapably sinful
nature to molding the child's pliant body and mind. On one hand, this modern emphasis
on the child's blankness underwrote the proliferation in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries of a transatlantic Anglo-American literature designed specifically for
children. At best, the Lockean belief in the child's intellectual malleability encouraged
calls for universal public education. On the other hand, by the early nineteenth century,
the child's blankness was dependent on its whiteness. The perfect malleability of
childhood did not extend to all young bodies; rather, the impressionability of white
children was defined in contrast to the imperfectibility of black people. While the
185
character of middle-class whites was increasingly credited to their nurture, the character
of African-Americans became inextricably linked with their nature. In early nineteenth-
century American discourses of childhood, we can see the racialization of Locke's child
development narrative.
The racialization of the child's nature occurred in tandem with the gradual
emancipation of slaves in the mid-Atlantic states (Connecticut, New York, New Jersey,
Philadelphia), the rise in support for plans to "colonize" freed African-Americans beyond
national borders, and the emergence of a discourse of racial essentialism that categorized
all peoples of Africa and their descendants in the diaspora as members of the "African
race," who shared particular character traits regardless of their childhood experiences. In
this paper, I trace a set of connections between the Lockean narrative of the (white)
malleable child and transatlantic discourses of slavery and race to elucidate the
dependence of the early-nineteenth century figuration of (white) American childhood on
the production of theories positing essential racial differences between Anglo- and
African-Americans. Specifically, the importation of pro-colonization British children's
literature encouraged a transatlantic identification between British and American (white)
children, and between British and American constructions of Africans. In these texts, all
(white) children are taught that all "Africans" are unassimilable others, whether they
come of age in Africa, in the British West Indies, in the American South, or in the
American North. In American pro-colonization discourse, the malleability of children of
African descent is trumped by their Africanity; their nurture matters less than their nature
in the development of their characters. From this perspective, colonization plans that
186
commit the children of slaves to spend their childhoods in slavery before being
simultaneously freed and deported to Africa appear neither unjust nor unnatural.
Paradoxically, the denial of the attributes and privileges of American children to
young African-Americans in the early nineteenth century was also supported by the
enduring modern analogy between Africans and children. The Romanticization of Africa
that flourished in British literature in the wake of the publication of Mungo Park's Travels
in the Interior Districts of Africa (1799) promotes the construction of Africa as "the land
of childhood" (as Hegel put it), and the construction of Africans of all ages as perpetual
children. The popular ideology of four-stages theory associates Africans with the lowest
stage of human civilization, the "infancy" of civilization, agriculture and manual labor.
The infantilization of Africans eliminates the need for their education, since they are
incapable of living as civilized adults. At the same time, the Romantic movement
associates children with the primitive. The logics of infantilization and of
Romanticization displace the figure of the African child itself. If all Africans are children,
and all children are like savages, then no Africans are children. Infantilization thus
reinforces the racialization of childhood: Africans are like children; true children are
white. The racial logic of the African-child analogy protects American childhood from
Africanity, even when the analogy is reversed and children are likened to savages. Thus
the Romantic American child emerges as innocent as a primitive and white at the moment
the African emerges as Romantic and marked by an essential Africanity.
187
Gradual Emancipation in Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania abolished slavery by legislative act in 1780, but the act neither ended
enslavement nor the state sponsored inequality of African Americans. The text of the act
portrays the legislation as an extension of the freedom gained by Pennsylvania's colonists
in 1776 to the African-Americans enslaved in the state. "We rejoice," the act reads, "that
it is in our power to extend a portion of that freedom to others, which hath been extended
to us." The act characterizes itself as "one more step to universal civilization." It
dismisses the significance of "a difference in feature or complexion," and insists that
"those persons who have heretofore been denominated Negro and Mulatto slaves" have
been "deprived . . . of the common blessings that they were by nature entitled to."
However, some African-Americans continued to labor as slaves in the state until 1847,
and within thirty years of passing the 1780 act, the state had developed a racialized labor
system that consigned "free" African-Americans to a socio-economic status akin to
slavery.
8

The degraded post-Revolutionary status of African-Americans in Pennsylvania
both derived from and contributed to the white supremacist belief in the inferiority of
Africans and their descendants. It called for the differential treatment of white and black
children. Section 3 of the 1780 Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery does
dramatically overturn the racist custom of consigning the children of enslaved women to
slavery, declaring that
all servitude for life, or slavery of children, in consequence of the slavery
of their mothers, in the case of all children born within this state, from and
after the passing of this act as aforesaid, shall be, and hereby is utterly
taken away, extinguished and for ever abolished.
188
However, the Act also dictates that the children of slaves be treated differently from the
children of free Pennsylvanians by mandating that the children of the enslaved be bound
as indentured servants until the age of twenty-eight, instead of age 18 (for white girls)
and age 21 (for white boys). In the aftermath of the 1780 Act, those white children who
were bound out in childhood, were only bound to the customary ages of 18 and 21, while
all children of slaves and many children of free African-Americans were bound out to age
28 regardless of gender. The new legal status of African-American children did not
provide them with the customary privileges of indentured servitude, such as remedial
education, and it added years of labor when young adults were in the laboring and
childbearing prime of their lives.
9
This extension of the indenture essentially shifted the
cost of abolition "from slaveowners to the children of slaves."
10

The gradual emancipation provisions that were built into the Act to protect the
property interests of slave owners severely undermined the possibility of equality for
African-Americans in Pennsylvania. States like Pennsylvania that implemented gradual
emancipation plans created a degraded social status for African-Americans, what Lois E.
Horton calls "a lesser citizenship," through a "limited black citizenship and a system of
unpaid black labor somewhere between slavery and freedom" that produced entrenched
racialized social inequality. In the wake of the state's declared commitment to equality,
the consequent social inequalities were increasingly attributed to racial difference. The
decades following the 1780 Act constituted "a period of racial reconstruction" during
which white northerners began to explain the degraded social status of blacks with
theories of essential racial difference.
11
Despite the systemic disadvantages faced by
189
Africans and their descendants in the new nation, including the virtual enslavement of the
children of slaves, whites held blacks responsible for their failure to achieve socio-
economic equality.
Individual Pennsylvanians also contributed to the degradation of African-
Americans in the state by systematically circumventing the law, with the active and tacit
support of their fellow white citizens. Slaveowners evaded the law by selling indentured
African-American servants into slavery in a southern state, by arranging for pregnant
slaves to give birth across the border in a slave state, and by indenturing the
grandchildren and great-grandchildren of their slaves until age twenty-eight. Major cities
in Pennsylvania allowed themselves to become preferred hunting grounds for those who
kidnapped African-Americans to sell them in the slave states. In the first half of the
nineteenth century, African-Americans in Pennsylvania endured a racist social system
that included "a new system of labor and social relations that exploited black labor and
left those who had been unshackled little opportunity for upward movement in society."
12

For the children of slaves, the 1780 Act extended life in servitude far beyond
adolescence, releasing them with little preparation for the accumulation of cultural or
material capital. Freed African-Americans in the state "almost always took places on the
bottom rung of society, with no land and little personal property or security."
13
Their
underprivileged status, in turn, required theories of "African" and "Negro" inferiority.
The white racism of early nineteenth-century Pennsylvania that was perpetuated
by the state's racialized labor system manifested itself in growing white support for plans
to remove all African-Americans from the nation. Eric Burin writes that, "white
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enthusiasm for black removal ignited once again during the early 1800s."
14
During this
period, "White hostility toward black northerners grew daily." Northern colonizationists
promised to end racial strife by gradually manumitting and expatriating all African-
Americans from the United States. Colonization plans first appeared in the decades
before the Revolution, remerged after the Declaration of Independence, and were
vigorously debated until the Civil War. Burin argues that "Between the Revolutionary era
and the early nineteenth century, colonization shaped the discourse on slavery and
race."
15
What emerged in the early nineteenth-century Northern discourse of slavery and
race was a theory of racial essentialism that supported the racial ideology of black
removal.
In this essay, I foreground a pro-colonization pamphlet published in Philadelphia
in 1816 to argue that early national American colonizationist rhetoric was heavily
influenced by the didactic writings of British reformers. American racial discourse
adapted a British Romantic perspective on "Africans" and Africa that underwrote the
separation of the Anglo and the African "races." As most British slaves lived in the West
Indies, didactic fiction figured the English people as entirely white. African characters are
mainly portrayed as inhabitants of Africa or the British West Indies, marked by a total
cultural alterity that cannot be made familiar. In the American context, this perspective
figured the white child as innocent, malleable, and crucial to the nation's future, and the
black child, regardless of the location or condition of his/her upbringing, as irredeemably
"foreign" to America, and incapable of normal (white) social development. All American
colonizationists promoted gradual emancipation plans which inevitably, like
191
Pennsylvania's 1780 Act, denied African-American children the same rights as white
children, and promoted a racially stratified society. During this same period, Americans
imbibed British literature for children that fed an emerging early national American
discourse of racial essentialism that partially displaced the environmentalism of climate
theory. Denying African-American children the rights and privileges of white children
appeared less problematic when American children were equated with British children
and African American children were characterized as entirely "African," and incapable of
becoming (white) American citizen, regardless of educational opportunities
Through reading literature written for children in Britain, American children in
the North imbibed an imaginative topography of slavery that had little to do with
American slavery, that imagined all Africans within the nation as alien inhabitants of
Africa or the West Indies. This coincided with a need to protect British American creole
children from degenerating due to their exposure to the American climate and American
slaves. Anglo-American children learned that they were European and white, regardless
of their having grown up in North America, and they learned that all inhabitants that were
descendants of Africa were essentially African and "Negro" regardless if they had grown
up in the same houses as their Euro-American peers. They learned this in the process of
being affiliated with British children through reading a literature targeted at British
children. To be a white child was both to be a child of Europe and to be uncorrupted by
the American continent and the distance from the British metropole.
My argument suggests the centrality of conceptions of childhood to the American
discourse of racial essentialism that developed in the 1820s. Ezra Tawil and others have
192
located the formation of essential ideas of Africanity in the frontier romances of the
1820s. My research suggests that these romances deployed the discourse of Indian
removal as a stand-in for the discourse of slavery expansion surrounding the Missouri
Compromise in part because colonizationists had already conceptualized African
Americans as nonassimilable extra-nationals who, like the native Americans, needed to
be removed from American society. Northern reformers were able to promote public
education for citizenship at the same time as they condemned all children born to
enslaved women to almost three decades of indentured servitude by perpetuating the
mythology that all Africans and all their descendants wherever they might be found on
the globe were child-like and suited physically and mentally to living and performing
manual labor in "primitive" agricultural societies in Africa.
The 1780 Act and Kazanjian's Colonizing Trick
The rhetorical commitment to natural rights equality in Pennsylvania's 1780 Gradual
Emancipation Act is undone by the way the law institutes racialized inequality of
opportunity at birth for African-Americans. In broad strokes, the Act exemplifies the
modus operandi of imperial policy: the simultaneous and profound imbrication of
equality and exclusion. Gradual emancipation policies illustrate Stoler's claim that "Both
American and European imperial discourses subscribed to universalist principles and
particularistic practices."
16
More specifically, the 1780 Act performs what David
Kazanjian calls the colonizing trick: the production of consistency between "an emerging,
Enlightenment conception of equality," and "a racially and nationally codified policy."
17

Kajanzian draws the phrase, colonizing trick, from the fourth section of David Walker's
193
Appeal (1829), in which the African-American tailor and writer critiques the
procolonizationist argument that characterizes colonization proposals as consistent with
the egalitarian ideals of the Declaration of Independence. For Kazanjian, Walker has
identified a paradox that continues to trouble the idea that Enlightenment universalism
transcends particularity in the wake of the American Revolution. The paradox, according
to Kazanjian, is that, "the rise of universal egalitarianism was coincident with the rise of
numerous, hierarchically codified, particularistic differences—perhaps most spectacularly
in the Americas the vigorously materialized ideas of race, on one hand, and nation, on the
other."
18
Kazanjian's focus is the rise of American colonizationist proposals in the early
nineteenth century. The gradual emancipation legislation that always formed an element
of these proposals also exemplifies the colonizing trick. It claims to adhere to a
philosophy of natural rights that includes African-Americans, yet it enforces racially
codified policies concerning children. In addition, I focus on the codification of the
American child figure during this same historical period. I want to draw on Kazanjian's
work to foreground the modern conception of the child that I argue was also partially
produced by colonization rhetoric (particularly the rhetoric and implementation of
gradual emancipation proposals) in the rise of racial essentialism.
Kazanjian's monograph sheds light on the production of American human
difference rhetoric in the decades following the revolution. He exposes "the diverse and
diffuse ways modern, codified conceptions of equality were articulated with modern,
codified conceptions of race and nation" in colonizationist discourse. As Kazanjian
argues, colonizationists proposed both "to create a white nation-state by purging North
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America of African Americans" and "to colonize Africa with Western economic,
political, and religious systems." These goals required "the systematic production and
maintenance of hierarchically codified, racial and national forms." Kazanjian argues that
colonizationist discourse "represent[s] blackness and whiteness as vague, irreducible
essences," signifies pigmentation "as a sign of natural . . . affiliation," and constructs the
African-American "into the racially codified 'African' national citizen-subject merely
formally equal to whites." This emergent discourse of racial essentialism "resolves" the
paradox between universalism and particularism, allowing "equality to be understood as
formally and abstractly universal" though not applicable in the same way to every body.
Thus, in the early nineteenth century, according to Kazanjian, "racial and national
codification forged a constitutive, if unstable, relationship with universal egalitarianism"
in that "the systematic production and maintenance of hierarchically codified, racial and
national forms actually enabled equality to be understood as formally and abstractly
universal." Paradoxically, racial categories allows manifestly unequal colonization
proposals to wear the mantle of universalism. In the process, colonizationist rhetoric
works to "define or congeal racial and national formations that had previously been
relatively indefinite or fluid," thus participating in the larger shift from eighteenth-
century environmental racial theory to the emergence in the early nineteenth century of a
rhetoric of racial essentialism.
19

Like other modern scholars of colonization as well as the proposal's contemporary
supporters, Kazanjian locates a critical origin of colonizationism and the rhetoric of racial
essentialism in the writings of Thomas Jefferson, particularly his Notes on the State of
195
Virginia (1787). Kazanjian writes that "Jefferson's name appears ritually in texts on
colonization from this period, for he was correctly regarded as one of the proposal's
earliest and most influential supporters." According to Kazanjian, Jefferson consistently
supported the colonization of freed slaves. As early as 1779, Jefferson supported a bill in
the Virginia legislature calling for the gradual emancipation and deportation of the state's
slave population. And as late as 1825, just before his death, Jefferson expressed written
support for colonization, "making it arguably his most consistently articulated policy
proposal." Jefferson's support for colonization was accompanied by a nascent theory of
inherent racial difference, a rhetoric that "invests black Americans with a common, racial
identity on the level of their existence as a discrete population." Jefferson's support for
the deportation of African Americans required the production of a "calculable black
population" which presumed a difference between descendants of Europeans and of
Africans that transcended environmental factors.
20

Tawil and The Racial Stamp Trope
Ezra Tawil elaborates on the connection between colonization discourse and theories of
racial essentialism in his recent book, The Making of Racial Sentiment (2006). In a
chapter entitled, "The Politics of Slavery and the Discourse of Race, 1787-1840," Tawil
carefully chronicles "an overall shift in a scientific and cultural common sense about
human differences" that occurred between the decades just after the Revolution and the
decades just before the Civil War.
21
In a word, Tawil argues that "Where eighteenth-
century thinkers emphasized a continuity in the natural world and the mutability of
human differences, nineteenth-century theory saw stark discontinuities among races and
196
presumed the permanence and stability of racial essences."
22
Eighteenth-century theory
linked "all variations, no matter how fundamental . . . to the effects of climate, diet, and
even state of society," while the nineteenth-century promoted "a theory of the races of
man as originally and permanently distinct"—a transition from human difference as "a
matter of condition to a matter of essence."
23
As part of this shift, racial traits came to be
seen as innate and hereditary.
24
This shift from condition to essence, according to Tawil,
was produced in part by colonizationist rhetoric which "presumed an essential and
immutable 'line of demarcation' between races," and "the racial inferiority of the
Negro."
25
Colonizationist discourse argued that the nation must abolish slavery to
promote social harmony, but just as crucially, must remove all freed slaves from within
its borders to prevent internal strife caused by immutable racial difference.
Tawil mentions but does not explore the role of gradual emancipation proposals in
the production of a theory of racial essentialism, but his discussion of the "habit" versus
"nature" debate provides a framework for such an exploration. As Tawil points out, the
shift from condition to essence also involved a shift from viewing race as a question of
nurture, to viewing race as a question of nature. From the perspective of eighteenth-
century theory, racial traits were mutable, even within a single lifetime. Thus Buffon
could claim that a "Hottentot" infant raised by Dutch colonists "soon became as white as
any European."
26
From the perspective of early nineteenth-century theory, racial traits
were immutable, regardless of environmental factors. Thus no amount of education or
training could render an African-American child fit for citizenship, as it could a
European-American child. Tawil calls attention the role of what he calls the "racial stamp
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trope" in theories of racial essentialism. In the early national context of a natural rights
rhetoric that accorded all persons a basic equality, pro-slavery and colonizationist rhetoric
perpetuated the trope of the "racial stamp" or the "logic of race as a natural mark." This
trope held that Africans and their descendants were "peculiarly" either suited to slavery,
or at least ill-suited for full citizenship in the new nation. Tawil observes that both
proponents of slavery and colonizationists perpetuated the ubiquitous trope of the "racial
stamp," arguing that the African American body was marked by "physical peculiarities,"
most notably "black" skin, that rendered him/her unassimilable. He/she could be made
"nominally free" but "could not become a legitimate part of the social body."
27
In
addition, the trope of the racial stamp signified the permanency and heritability of
"blackness."
28
The implication of the racial stamp trope was that all "blacks," regardless
of their social status and upbringing, were incapable of becoming full citizens, or of
birthing full citizens. Arguably, the belief in the permanent and heritable inferiority of
African Americans legitimated gradual emancipation plans that consigned the children of
slaves to spend the better part of their lives as slaves before being deported, and, in turn,
the systematic denial of education to these children buttressed cultural beliefs in African
American inferiority.
In Kazanjian's terms, the racial stamp trope was an aspect of the colonizing trick
which rendered universal equality consistent with particular inequality: all men are
created equal, except Africans who are by nature inferior. I want to suggest that the racial
stamp trope is specifically a reaction to the Lockean discourse of the child as a blank
surface amenable to inscription. The Lockean theory of the infant as free from innate
198
ideas supports his political argument about natural rights. All children are born with the
potential to become self-governing and capable of giving consent to be governed. The
notion that African-American children are born stamped or stained suggests that they do
not have the same potential or capacity. Thus what Tawil characterizes as a shift from
nurture to nature is perhaps better described as a process of racialization in which Euro-
American children continue to be defined by their universal Lockean malleability, while
African-American children are defined by their particular lack of precisely such a
malleability.
29

Jefferson's Notes
We can see in Jefferson's Notes how a racialized nature/nurture debate underwrites the
unequal treatment of children and produces raced American adults. With regard to
children in general, Jefferson clearly subscribes to the Lockean theory of the child as a
blank slate, a malleable being that can be molded through education into an ideal citizen.
His public education plan entitles every male child to three years of free schooling. Those
children who exhibit "genius" and "superior genius" will be provided with higher
education. This plan will "provide an education adapted to the years, to the capacity, and
the condition of every one, and directed toward their freedom and happiness." In arguing
for the teaching of Greek and Latin, Jefferson rehearses the Lockean theory that children
are particularly impressionable. He describes children's memory as "the most susceptible
and tenacious of impressions." Early education will "impress the mind" of children "with
useful facts and good principles." In the egalitarian spirit of natural rights rhetoric,
Jefferson also makes clear that mental genius is not innately linked to class, arguing that
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"nature has sown [talents] as liberally among the poor as the rich." At the same time,
Jefferson emphasizes the deleterious effects of not exploiting children's particular
malleability. If a child is not educated, "the mind becomes lethargic and impotent," and
mental capacities "perish without use, if not sought for and cultivated." Jefferson worries
in particular about the impact of slavery on the sons of slaveowners: witnesses to their
parents' "unremitting despotism" over their slaves, children become permanently stained:
"thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, [they] cannot but be stamped . . .
with odious peculiarities." For Jefferson, white children in a slave society risk being
inscribed with depravity and molded "into despots."
With regard to the children of slaves, Jefferson harbors no similar concerns.
Whereas white children can be stained by slavery, black children are born stained
regardless of whether or not they are enslaved. In the same chapter in which he proposes
universal public education, Jefferson also outlines his plan for the differential treatment
of the children of slaves. Jefferson proposes that all children born to slaves after a
particular date "be brought up . . . to tillage, arts or sciences, according to their geniusses"
and then "colonized" oustide of the country. While both free and slave children will be
reared "according to their geniusses," the majority of slave children will be trained for
"tillage" rather than taught basic literacy. And all children of slaves will be deported upon
reaching the age of majority, equipped "with arms, implements of houshold and of the
handicraft arts, feeds, pairs of the useful domestic animals, &c." Like the inhabitants—
human and animal—of Noah's Ark, black youth will be sent away to settle and reproduce
somewhere elsewhere, "to such place as the circumstances of the time should render most
200
proper"--a racial dialysis. The vagaries of the proposal heighten its mythic, metaphorical
language and scope: to purge the United States of the stains of slavery and African-
Americans.
Colonization is necessary, in Jefferson's view, because "blacks" are marked by
their "colour," a "difference fixed in nature." Jefferson links "black" skin to an "inferior"
capacity to reason. While his public education plan is designed to discover the "superior"
geniusses in the free population and send them to college, Jefferson doubts there can exist
a black child who, when educated, will be "capable of tracing and comprehending the
investigations of Euclid," or of "utter[ing] a thought above the level of plain narration." In
Jefferson's view, black children, regardless of their education, remain incapable of being
molded into full citizens of the republic. In the same sentence in which he describes how
colonized black youth will be equipped for their transplantation, he proposes that the
government import "an equal number of white inhabitants" from other countries. Every
black youth trained for husbandry will be sent away, to be replaced by a white body
capable of higher reasoning. Since the freed slave cannot "mix" with whites "without
staining the blood of his master," he must be "removed beyond the reach of mixture."
Through gradual emancipation followed by involuntary repatriation, Jefferson hopes to
prevent both race conflict and contamination. Whether intentionally or no, he also
supports a plan that will maintain a low to nonexistent level of basic education among the
descendants of Africans.
Arguably, one emphasis of Jefferson's colonization plan concerns ridding the
population of blacks of genius. In the same passage in which he muses about black
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intellectual inferiority, Jefferson dismisses the poetry of Phills Wheatley as "below the
dignity of criticism," as if to purge its existence it from national memory. It's as if
Jefferson can't deny that some "black" children, like "white" children, might have
"talents" that can be "cultivated," but he is determined that they should not have the
possibility of registering these "talents" as a group in the United States. While Jefferson
refers only to male white children when discussing his public education plan, he
pointedly mentions both genders ("till the females should be eighteen, and the males
twenty-one years of age") when proposing gradual emancipation. There is no question
but that black women will be engaging in manual labor, alongside the black men. In
Jefferson's vision for the future of the nation, black youth are destined to "cultivate" the
earth rather than their minds.
Gradual Emancipation and Racial Essentialism
Joanne Melish is one of the few scholars to consider the impact of northern post-
revolutionary gradual emancipation policies on American discourses of racial difference.
Melish traces the emergence of a "northern racial thinking—a distinctive kind of racism"
that emerged from the slow demise of slavery coupled with a "constructed amnesia"
about the existence of slavery in the North. She argues that "slow emancipation . . .
enabled whites to transfer a language and a set of practices shaped in the context of
slavery to their relations with a slowly emerging free people of color." For example, after
the passing of gradual emancipation acts, the children of slaves were essentially slaves
for the majority of their lives, even though they were legally "free." At the same time,
whites erased the history of slavery in the north, disassociating "degraded" blacks from
202
the major cause of their degradation. Thus, in the decades following the Revolution,
Melish argues, gradual emancipation proposals left free people of color "demonstrably
poorer and less literate than whites" and "prey to charges of innate inferiority." In this
context, "the debased condition of free people of color could be understood as the logical
consequence of their own innate inferiority." According to Melish, gradual emancipation
proposals helped to shift the terms of the debate about black socio-economic status from
nurture to nature. In the process, the "discourse of condition"—referring to "economic
status, mental and moral capacity, social behavior, or 'situation'"—"effectively becomes a
discourse of race." Thus, Melish links the general shift from condition to essence in racial
discourse identified by Tawil to the politics of accounting for the depressed socio-
economic status of "free" blacks in the northern states in the wake of emancipation
proposals.
30

Like other scholars of colonization and racial difference, Melish implicates
textual culture in the emergence of American racial essentialism. She argues that after
1800, two kinds of literature that generated anxiety about the mutability of racial identity
foreclosed the possibility of racial transformation and undergirded the association
between African descent and permanent innate inferiority. They are stories of albinism
and vitiglio, and Algerine captivity narratives. The former resolved that "white Negroes,"
were just that, not white people, and the latter denied that enslavement in a hot climate
could "transform Americans into darkened and dependent 'slaves.'" These narratives
"ultimately reassured readers that even seemingly extreme types of transformations of
human identity could be understood, controlled, and revealed to be superficial rather than
203
essential," and "they served to remap the location of difference, situating it deep within
the body, where descent provided the only conclusive marker of innate and essential
nature." These narrative messages reassured whites in a society in which whiteness
conferred the privileges of citizenship. Tawil makes the related point that Jefferson's
Notes may have emphasized an essentialist discourse of race over an environmental one
in part "to bolster the ontological stability of the English creole against the imputation of
degeneracy" (64), and to ward off the accusations that America was a corrupt version of
Europe. Jefferson's Notes, according to Tawil, "puts in circulation a way of thinking
about difference that seemed to make intrinsic properties ultimately more important than
geography."
31
Building on Melish and Tawil, one could say that certain American
narratives of the period rendered whiteness and blackness both permanent and portable.
At the moment that English creoles were no longer English, but American, their
connection to English culture was affirmed and maintained through a racial construction
of whiteness. At the same time, whether slaves had grown up in the US, the West Indies,
or Africa, their dark skin signified ineradicable difference and inferiority, feeding
growing national support for colonization proposals.
Scholarship suggests that many types of textual culture contributed to the
emerging discourse of racial essentialism. Melish also mentions that the early nineteenth
century northern public encountered racist public texts, "a suffocating stream of
propaganda—satirical broadsides, condemnatory sermons and pamphlets—that reflected
and reinforced popular assumptions about black inferiority." Tawil argues in general that
literature "is an important site of racial formation," and in particular, that the genre of the
204
frontier romance produced what he calls, racial sentiment: "the notion that members of
different races both feel different things, and feel things differently" (2-3). The frontier
romance thus participated in "the gradual reconceptualization of human difference from a
matter of outward surfaces and somatic textures to an interior property, hidden within the
body and revealed through its actions" (10-11). In this paper, I focus on the role of
children's literature in shaping the early nineteenth-century discourse of racial
essentialism. Specifically, I argue that white American children imbibed a political
geography of Africa written for British children, strangers to domestic slavery, that
characterized all the dark-skinned peoples in the African diaspora as Romanticized
childish savages who were permanently "foreign" to whites regardless of where those
individual "Africans" grew up. Working backwards, I argue that the 1816 pro-
colonization pamphlet entitled, A Portraiture of Domestic Slavery, manifests a nascent
American discourse of racial essentialism that incorporates the representation of Africans
in British geographies for children. I conclude that children's literature provided a
language that could camouflage the anti-black racism of gradual emancipation and
colonization proposals, and legitimate their goal of removing African-Americans from
the American body-politic.
American Colonization
The American Colonization Society (ACS) was an organization founded in 1816 that
promoted the removal of all African-Americans to locations outside the United States as
a solution to growing sectional tensions over issues related to slavery. In the process, it
solidified an emerging discourse of racial essentialism. Burin writes that the pro-
205
colonizationist ACS "hoped to rid the United States of both slavery and black people"
(Burin 2005 1). According to Kazanjian, this "imperial vision" of the ACS that desired "a
racially and nationally particular, white American nation" required that African
Americans be "represented ... as racially particularized subjects to be separated from
white America" (95). Many African-Americans opposed the ACS and colonization, but
they were substantially outnumbered by white support. Melish suggests that the shift in
African-American self-referential rhetoric after 1820 from "African" to "coloured" or
"black" reflected "the perception that it had become dangerous for people of color to
suggest an origin or allegiance outside the United States in the face of the American
Colonization Society's determination to send them 'back' to their African 'homeland.'" At
the same time, these African-American discourses of color and blackness to signal
inhabitants of the United States of African descent also participated in "the increasingly
pervasive discourse of physical difference and 'essence'" (Melish 667) that underwrote
colonizationist rhetoric. Thus, in a variety of ways, the American Colonization Society
promoted and perpetuated the Jeffersonian sense that legitimate Americans were white,
and that African-Americans were inescapably alien.
In the same year as the founding of the ACS, a Philadelphia physician named
Jesse Torrey, Jr. composed a pamphlet promoting gradual emancipation and colonization.
This pamphlet manifests a discourse of racial essentialism that is absent from
Pennsylvania's 1780 Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery, and only nascent in
Philadelphian Thomas Branagan's 1805 Serious Remonstrances . . . Consisting of
Speculations and Animadversions, on the Recent Revival of the Slave Trade, in the
206
American Republic. Torrey's pamphlet is entitled: A Portraiture of Domestic Slavery, in
the United States: With reflections on the practicability of restoring the moral rights of
the slave, without impairing the legal privileges of the possessor; and a project of a
colonial asylum for free persons of colour: including memoirs of facts on the interior
traffic in slaves, and on kidnapping. The Torrey pamphlet's long title signals its
engagement with the dominant questions of the contemporary northern debate about
slavery: How can southern slavery be abolished without compromising the legal rights of
slaveowners? In the event of emancipation, how can the middle-Atlantic states avoid an
influx of freed southern blacks seeking opportunity? As Torrey documents, the proximity
of the middle-Atlantic states to the slave states meant that black Americans often crossed
into Pennsylvania, New York, etc. to escape their enslavement and socio-economic
oppression. For this reason, major northern cities in these states became both hunting
grounds for slave traders and way stations for slave coffles on their way "down the river."
Northern whites feared the increased migration of Southern blacks that would accompany
the abolition of slavery, but they feared even more the power that the slave states
garnered from the 3/5s compromise that allowed each slave in the south to count as 3/5s
of a person for the purposes of political representation in the Federal House of
Representatives. In proposing colonization of all freed blacks, Torrey spoke to the
growing number of white northerners who supported colonization, evident in the
establishment of the American Colonization Society in Philadelphia in 1816. Torrey
crafted a discourse of African racial essentialism that resolved the conflict between, on
the one hand, enlightenment equal rights rhetoric, and on the other, plans to enslave the
207
children of slaves for the majority of their lives and to remove freed African-Americans
from within national borders.
Jesse Torrey
We can see in Torrey's pamphlet the ways in which American procolonizationist
discourse fed on British attitudes toward Africa disseminated in America via British
children's didactic literature. Torrey appropriates the rhetorical strategies of British
political geographies for children. Torrey's A Portraiture of Domestic Slavery (1817)
provides a window onto the racial ideology that facilitated anti-slavery, pro-
colonizationist rhetoric in the second decade of the nineteenth century, and onto the
textual sources that fed that ideology. The Philadelphia physician, Jesse Torrey, wrote
and published his anti-slavery, pro-colonization pamphlet twenty-seven years after the
1780 Act, just as the first generation of black children enslaved by that law approached
the age of emancipation. Although Torrey's anti-slavery argument echoes the Act's
natural rights rhetoric, his pamphlet does not strive "to add one more step to universal
civilization," as the Act had. Rather, as its title summarizes, A Portraiture of Domestic
Slavery, in the United States promotes a "Project of a Colonial Asylum for Free Persons
of Colour." The idealistic post-revolutionary language of the Act has given way to a
growing consensus in the middle-Atlantic states that blacks and whites are members of
separate races who cannot inhabit the same territory on an equal footing with each other.
Torrey's pro-colonizationist stance is accompanied by a revised racial ideology based in
essential racial difference. Although Torrey's prose contains some remnants of a more
flexible, environmental belief about the racial characteristics associated with Africanity,
208
his text mainly enacts the early Romantic strategies of an ideology of white supremacy
that will firmly take hold in the North in the 1830s.
32

One of the most striking differences between the language of race in the Act and
in A Portraiture is the introduction of the term "African" to denote enslaved and free
blacks in the United States, most of whom have never been to any part of the vast
continent of Africa. Where the authors of the Act asserted their common humanity with
enslaved "Negroes and Mulattoes" in Pennsylvania, and their difference from the
inhabitants of "Great Britain," the emerging language of racial essentialism in Torrey
reverses this momentum: A Portraiture lumps all descendants of Africans—in Africa, the
West Indies, and North America, enslaved and free—into a group called the "African
race." And by implication, whites in Britain and the United States are bonded to each
others as members of the "white race." The pamphlet suggests that the northern shift to
"racial modernity" and a white national identity is supported by an estrangement of the
black population from national belonging and an affiliation of white creoles with British
culture. Torrey's ability to identify and speak about "the sable heathen neighbors in our
own dwellings" constitutes his whiteness and his national belonging.
Torrey's anti-slavery views are grounded in natural rights rhetoric, but he
nonetheless sees blacks as belonging to a foreign and inferior "race." In a passage in
which Torrey references the 1780 Act in a footnote, he agrees that blacks and whites are
members of the same species.
33
However, Torrey does not believe that natural rights
rhetoric mandates social equality for every "race." On one hand, the abolition of slavery
is clearly dictated by the values on which the new nation is purportedly based: "the
209
abstract relative principles of moral and political justice; the sacred axioms of our
Declaration of Independence, and of our Constitution." On the other, these values do not
dictate that free blacks in the United States have a right to full citizenship. Torrey writes:
"I do not consider it to be our duty to grant them a participation in the civil privileges of
citizenship." Why? Because "They are created a distinct race of people," and therefore do
not truly belong. Torrey, like Jefferson, raises the specter of racial amalgamation to stress
racial difference: "the designs of the Author of Nature ought not to be thwarted, by
permitting their conjugal commixture with a race physically different."
34
They deserve
only "the common privileges of aliens and strangers." And extending them citizenship
"would be equally as absurd . . . as it would be to import 2,000,000 prisoners of war from
Turkey or China, and make citizens of them." In Torrey's vision of a United States true to
its principles, blacks in America cannot be slaves, but neither can they be equal citizens.
The "free black and mulatto population" are "strangers in a foreign land." They are
irreversibly racially and nationally foreign to the American social body.
Torrey's tract vacillates between emphasizing an egalitarian Lockeanism and a
romantic Rousseauism: the educability of "Africans" in the U.S. and Africans' essential
"national" and "racial" difference from whites. Torrey claims to believe that blacks have
the same intellectual capacity as whites, which is part of the reason why he can oppose
enslavement and promote colonization of African American adults.
35
On the other hand,
he opposes immediate emancipation, grounded in the imputation that "Africans" cannot
become civilized within one generation. To begin with, "[t]heir colour and faculties" are
"adapted" to Africa;
36
they are particularly "adapted by nature to the heat."
37
In addition,
210
for Torrey, Africans are innately docile; "Docility is well known to be one of the peculiar
characteristics of the African race." We can see the conflation of individual and racial
identity in Torrey's discussion of African educability. Torrey brings up the "peculiar"—
and childish—racial trait of docility in the context of the African's "capacity of receiving
instruction, and of becoming qualified for humane and moral government." In
recommending that "enslaved Africans" be "tamed by moral instruction and kind
treatment," Torrey promotes the myth of innate African savagery.
38

Torrey looks forward to "eventual freedom and reception into an asylum" for
"enslaved Africans" in the southern states, but not before they have been civilized as a
race, not before they have "become qualified by intelligence and moral cultivation, for
the rational enjoyment of liberty, and the performance of the various relative social
virtues and duties of life."
39
Torrey conflates the education of the individual with the
education of the group, assuming that individual blacks cannot be free "until several
successive generations shall have been moralized by education."
40
The potential for
development of the African individual compares poorly with the potential for
development of the sons and daughters of slave-owners, whose own "intellectual and
moral improvement" will become the basis for eventual black freedom, the "arch" on
which their freedom "may be gradually erected."
41
Speaking directly to the enslaved,
Torrey counsels patience and submission to "the gradual progress of reason, and the
principles of humanity."
42

We can see in Torrey's tract how pro-colonization literature forges a trans-
Atlantic alliance between whites in the American free states, in the slave states, and in
211
Great Britain. At the end of his essay, Torrey rallies whites across the nation to end
slavery gradually because "It is both the right and duty of the citizens of the north to unite
with their brethren in the south, washing away this obnoxious stain upon the national
character." When emancipation has taken place, the United States can join Britain in their
unstained superiority; the American Eagle will "proclaim to an applauding world, with
unalloyed truth, that 'The sons of Columbia shall ne'er be slaves.’"
43
Torrey's tract thus
underscores the intimate relationship between the civilization of "Africans" and the
education of white American children for (racial and) national belonging. Alan
Richardson argues about the British context that "issues of race and especially
colonialism were related both discursively and institutionally to the development of
children's literature."
44
I suggest that early American colonization ideology was also
related to British children's literature. Torrey wanted white Americans to adopt a British
view of Africa and Africans. The British view facilitated the pro-colonizationist belief
that descendants of Africans, whether or not they had been raised in America, were
racially "foreign" to readers and belonged in Africa, and that white Americans, like the
British, should take a didactic position, "to civilize and instruct that inoffensive and
helpless race of people, whose lot has been cast under our guardianship."
45
The British
perspective was infused with an early Romanticism that emphasized the child-like and
essentially different nature of "the African."
Pedagogies
Recent critical work emphasizes the relationship between American colonization
ideology, whiteness, nationalism, and pedagogy, but it generally neglects the role of
212
British Romanticism, in part because it overlooks the widespread influence of British
children's literature in America. In his article on Robert Finley, the founder of the
American Colonization Society, Chris Castiglia argues that colonizationist rhetoric was
crucial to early American nationalism. "By asserting that whites alone belonged in
America, the Colonization society helped establish the national identity in the image of
whiteness." Colonization discourse manifests "the discursive processes through which
citizens of a young nation came to think of themselves as white and American (American
because white)." Castiglia finds the origins of the white subject of colonization rhetoric
in earlier American disciplinary cultural discourses, such as the pedagogy of John
Witherspoon, which contain "modes of address that arranged identities in hierarchical
relationships," so that "the white subject is already constituted at the moment it addresses
the condition of blacks from a position both set apart from and superior to those marked
as permanently ‘other.’"
46

Amy Kaplan considers the way that colonization rhetoric is facilitated by "the
cultural work of domesticity," in American middle-class women's culture between the
1830s and the 1850s. Kaplan argues that domestic ideology "unite[s] men and women in
a national domain" and "generate[s] notions of the foreign against which the nation can
be imagined as home."
47
Kaplan connects childrearing in the domestic sphere to the
imperial project of civilizing "foreign" peoples. Kaplan's analysis of the work of Sara
Josepha Hale, who promoted both separate spheres and the colonization of American
blacks, "uncovers the shared racial underpinnings of domestic and imperialist discourse
through which the separateness of gendered spheres reinforces the effort to separate the
213
races by turning blacks into foreigners."
48
Thus the "empire of the mother" and the
American empire "both follow a double compulsion to conquer and domesticate the
foreign."
49
Kaplan finds the racial logic of colonization underwriting the domestic novels
of mid-century. Hale's novel Liberia (1852), for example, like Uncle Tom's Cabin,
"makes African colonization necessary to the establishment of domesticity within
America as exclusively white."
50

David Kazanjian looks to Jefferson's Notes to argue that colonization rhetoric
"sought to teach white and black American subjects to understand themselves" as
"discrete racial populations organized into distinct nations."
51
Kazanjian argues that the
"imperial vision" of colonization "sought not only to form a racially and nationally
particular, white American nation, but also to begin spreading the supposedly universal
and exemplary elements of white America: its Christianity, its capitalist economy, and its
governmental system of national statehood." Like Kaplan, Kazanjian highlights the "dual
interrelated roles" of colonization: "racial purification of domestic space and imperial
power over foreign spaces."
52
Kazanjian analyzes an 1832 Massachusetts Sabbath School
Union tract to tie colonization to "cultural essentialism," arguing that it "represent[s]
blackness and whiteness as vague, irreducible essences whose proximity necessarily
produces conflict and the eventual subjugation of blackness." In the text, colonization
ideology "relies upon a racially particular, white domestic space with absolute power
over black Americans."
53

The scholarship of Castiglia, Kaplan and Kazanjian that I have just explicated
represents colonization as an American phenomenon, stressing the connection between
214
colonization and American imperialism. This approach overlooks the way that American
imperialism sought to emulate British imperialism, and the way that American whiteness
also depended for its coherence on British Romantic literature imbibed by young
Americans. Torrey's tract also provides a corrective perspective to the work of Martin
Brückner on geography education in the early American republic. Bruckner characterizes
geography as a "basic structure and imaginary form through which Americans effectively
gave themselves the official imprimatur of a national identity."
54
He argues that "the
sources dominating the ways in which American readers were introduced to geography"
were American. It was the school geographies of Jedidiah Morse, Bruckner argues, that
"shaped the basic cognitive as well as advanced literary perception of geography among
the first and second generation citizens."
55
But Torrey's tract contains a scene in which a
boy in Philadelphia is "studying his lessons in Goldsmith's Abridgement of Geography,"
a British primer from the mid-1770s. The boy reads about the character of "the
inhabitants of the United States" from the British perspective, participating in a British
trans-Atlantic community of white.
56

The connections that scholars have drawn between a racialized early American
nationalism and pedagogical discourse arguably have roots in the British imperialism of
the early nineteenth century. The British were involved in "returning" Euro-Africans to
Africa as early as the late eighteenth century. As Kazanjian points out, the American
Colonization Society "took inspiration from the British Committee for the Relief of the
Black Poor, founded in 1786, and the British Sierra Leone Company, founded in 1791."
57

What scholars of American colonization have not considered is how the deluge of
215
didactic materials for British children from the 1780s to the 1820s aimed at molding their
support for colonization in turn influenced the perspective and discipline of children in
the United States. This early British didactic literature promoted both Romantic
childhood and Romantic Africa, and it is through this literature that the figures of the
"simple" African and the child became profoundly interrelated as the proper objects of
imperial discipline, and decidedly distinguished from each other by an emergent racial
essentialism.
Childhood and Postcolonial Theory
That is, an idea of childhood, together with a mercantile imperialism, began to emerge in the
early Renaissance, the 'Age of Discoveries'; it was honed by the Enlightenment emphasis on
individual development through empiricism, reason, and training; it reached its apogee by the
middle of the nineteenth century with the consolidation of an enormously contradictory discourse
surrounding 'the child' as, on the one hand, a sentimentalized wisdom figure and, on the other,
national human capital, responsive to careful husbanding and investment. This construction of
'the child' coincides with the apogee of English colonial imperialism; indeed, it was an idea of
'the child' – of the not yet fully evolved or consequential subject—which made thinkable a
colonial apparatus officially dedicated to, in Macaulay's words, 'the improvement of' colonized
peoples.
- Jo-Ann Wallace, De-Scribing The Water Babies: The Child in Post-Colonial Theory

British imperial rhetoric promoted the analogy between the child and the colonized that
underwrote their connection in the British Romantic imagination. Bill Ashcroft argues
that the child figure is essential to imperialism: "the trope of the child, both explicitly and
implicitly, offered a unique tool for managing the profound ambivalence of imperialism,
because it absorbed and suppressed the contradictions of imperial discourse itself."
58
For
Ashcroft, the child trope was particularly crucial to resolving the "fundamental and
disabling contradiction" between the "guarantee of individual freedom which
Enlightenment philosophy promised" and "the phenomenon of slavery, and the race
216
thinking which it generated." Ashcroft points out that childhood and race were
"coterminous" rhetorical inventions that were mutually constituted through a "Cross-
fertilization between concepts of childhood and primitivism." The child figure naturalizes
both racial ideology and European hegemony over non-European peoples: "the idea of
the child dilutes the hostility inherent in that [racial] taxonomy and offers a 'natural'
justification for imperial dominance over subject peoples."
59

Ashcroft traces the link between "infantility" and primitivism that underwrites
empire to the dynamics of the "post-medieval" "invention of childhood" documented
most successfully by Philippe Ariès. The ontological status of the child as different from
the adult incorporates the mandates of the print culture that produced it, in that the
child/adult division can "only be bridged by a systematic form of education." Emerging at
the same historical moment, and also a product of print culture, the division between
"civilized" and "barbarous" nations turned on the notion of literacy. Thus, there is a
"precise corollary" between, on the one hand, adulthood and childhood, and on the other,
"the imperial centre and the illiterate, barbarous, childlike races of the empire." Literacy
and education are thus intrinsic to the discipline of both children and the colonized,
"crucial in the imperial expansion of Europe, establishing ideological supremacy,
inculcating the values of the colonizer, and separating the 'adult' colonizing races from
the 'childish' colonized." Imperialism deploys education to reinstantiate the gap between
colonized and colonizer that it purports to close.
60

Ashcroft further connects the significance of the child figure in imperial rhetoric
to its ability to resolve the contradiction between the child as a blank slate and the child
217
as a source of natural goodness, epitomized by the contradiction between Lockean and
Rousseauian concepts of the child. Wallace describes the contradiction as that between
the child as "national human capital, responsive to careful husbanding and investment"
and the child as "a sentimentalized wisdom figure." The blank slate concept empowers
educators by stressing the child's and the colonized's "potential and amenability to
inscription," and helps to clear colonial space in "preparation for the civilizing processes
of colonization."
61
Ashcroft argues that the "unformedness of colonial space" operates as
a "geographic metaphor of the savage mind."
62
On the other hand, the figure of the child
as natural and innocent, emphasized by Rousseau, connects the colonized to a noble
savagery that resists the corruptions of civilization and maturity. This contradiction
allows the colonized to be at once both the proper object of imperial discipline because
he/she is in need of education, and an impossible object of imperial discipline because
he/she can never attain a European level of civilization, regardless of education.
We can see the dynamics of the child figure identified by Ashcroft in early
nineteenth century British children's literature. What I want to add to Ashcroft's analysis
is the observation that the child/primitive analogy racializes the discourse of childhood in
particular ways. It reinforces the whiteness of the child that can cross into adulthood, and
collapses age distinctions among primitives. The whiteness of the child acts as the sign
that the child can develop, whereas non-white children and the adults they become are
marked by a hereditary savagery that disallows full civilization. The whiteness of the
Romantic child allows it to exhibit both the superior qualities of the primitive and to
distinguish itself ontologically from the primitive. Neither the non-white child, nor the
218
non-white adult has this capacity. My observation suggests that the Locke-Rousseau
contradiction is also partially resolved by a racial ideology that imbues the white child
subject with inherent goodness and total malleability, and the black child subject with
inherent savagery and limited malleability. In this scenario, the non-whiteness of the
individual child operates as a racial stamp that connotes an hereditary racial essentialism
which precludes adulthood, consigning all non-white subjects to perpetual static
childhood. And the whiteness of the child signals its membership in the community of the
civilized, even when its inability to speak, read or write associates it with savagery.
The child/primitive trope has a particular resonance in the context of British-
African relations. As Hegel's observations on Africa suggest, the continent and all its
peoples were consigned by the Enlightenment to the lowest, and therefore most-childlike,
state of civilization. Paraphrasing Hegel, Ashcroft writes that "Africa, like the
consciousness of the individual African, is locked in the period of childhood before the
dawn of imperial discourse."
63
As Ashcroft's paraphrase makes clear, the infantilization
of Africa, the continent and its peoples, "locks" the individual African subject to a child
consciousness incapable of development.
The child and the African have a particularly conflated relationship in British
Romanticism. As Ashton Nichols has argued, travelers' accounts of Africa contributed
greatly to Romantic ideology. Nichols' description of the "contradictory myth" of the
African in British literature evokes the Lockean-Rousseauean contradiction discussed by
Ashcroft and Wallace. Nichols writes that the Romantic construction of Africa contained
a contradiction between Africa as "a land of extraordinary natural beauty filled with
219
untold resources" and as a land of "overgrown wasteland inhabited by dangerous animals
and savages who were a threat to all forms of civilized life." Nichols identifies
a polyvalent discourse about Africa that at once sanctions a Romantic
ideology (nature is redemptive, Africans share a common humanity with
Europeans, the 'state of nature' is benevolent—as are 'noble savages—
primitives are childlike, women are superior to men), while also preparing
the way for various Victorian forms of cultural imperialism (non-
Christians are barbaric, African nature is so wild as to need taming,
European knowledge is a form of power necessary to control unjust
African forms of authority).
64

Thus the paradox of the Romantic ideology of Africa identified by Nichols is like the
paradox of imperial ideology identified by Ashcroft and Wallace: "the people [of Africa]
have promise but fall far short of human potential . . . . [Africans] may be 'gentle and
benevolent,' but they are also in need of care and ‘development.’"
65
And both paradoxes
are resolved through the trope of the child.
Torrey signals his engagement with British Romanticism in a variety of ways. As
I have argued, he encouraged white American to adopt a British view of African-
Americans. He encouraged his readers to regard all blacks in the United States, regardless
of whether or not they had been born in Africa or raised as slaves in America, as
"Africans" and "foreigners." One signal is his inclusion of excerpts from Mungo Park's
travel narrative in his pro-colonization tract. Nichols credits Park's texts with contributing
to the "cultural framework [that] helped to produce a series of metaphors, points of view,
and unquestioned assumptions that at once created and critiqued emerging ideologies—
not only of Africa—but of a more broadly 'Romantic' sensibility." While Park's tract
(1790), like Blake and Equiano, contains a "polyvalent discourse"
66
about Africa that
underwrites both imperialism and its critique, Torrey's selection of excerpts from Park
220
(taking up almost a fifth of the tract) emphasizes the African as a chronic child-subject,
"rude children of nature, free from restraint." Torrey includes Park's description of the
typical "disposition" of Africans, exemplified in the "Mandingoes" who "are a very
gentle race, cheerful in their disposition, inquisitive, credulous, simple and fond of
flattery." Torrey editorializes in the footnotes of this section on the meaning of Park's
narrative, that whatever "depravity" exists among the Africans is due to "their deprivation
of early instruction and moral knowledge."
67
From the "polyvalent discourse" of Park and
early British Romanticism, Torrey isolates and perpetuates the association between the
African and the child in need of education.
My reading of American colonization ideology suggests that its rhetoric and its
success had much to do with its adoption of British Romantic ideology concerning
childhood and Africa. In addition, I argue that the version of British Romanticism that it
promoted was reductive, calcifying the child/primitive analogy, underscoring the
whiteness (and Britishness) of true children and the racial trait of child-likeness in blacks.
I want to conclude this chapter with a brief sketch of three tremendously popular
representations of the "Negro" in British Romantic didactic literature before Torrey's tract
(1816) and the founding of the American Colonization Society (1817). These narratives
were popular on both sides of the Atlantic, frequently reprinted and widely read. And
they contain a version of Romantic ideology that reduces the ambiguity and complexity
about imperialism and race inspired by Blake's "Little Black Boy" and Equiano's
Interesting Narrative.
221
Ann Taylor's "The Little Negro" was published in London in 1806 in the
collection, Rhymes for the Nursery. The Taylor sisters also wrote the popular Original
Poems for Infant Minds (London, 1804-1805) designed for "that interesting little race, the
race of children" (Preface, A1). "The Little Negro" is a short poem that tells the story of a
"poor little negro boy" who had been kidnapped from Africa, and who is now begging in
England. The poem ends with the call for someone to complain to the king that it is a
"crying sin" to "steal him from his house" even though he is a "little negro boy" with
"sooty skin." In this poem, the anti-slave trade sentiment is undermined by the
representation of African childhood as the site of childlike behavior, "outlandish plays"
and "merry merry play." Alan Richardson calls the poem a "lesson in condescension."
68

Unlike Blake's "Little Black Boy," Taylor's "Little Negro Boy" has not received an
education in Africa, and he is not a speaking subject. He is an object in the poem that
does not undergo any transformation. Whether playing merrily in Africa or begging
miserably in England, the boy is uneducated and uncivilized. In addition, the poem makes
clear that there is no place for him in England where he can only be a beggar,
permanently outside of civilization, particularly the domestic sphere. The thrust of the
poem's argument is that the boy should never have been taken out of Africa, and that his
best option is to be returned there. The "little negro boy" belongs in Africa.
The same is true of the "Negro" who is no longer a child but retains the
consciousness of a child because of his connection to Africa signaled by his black skin. In
the popular English collection, Poems on the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1809), the
stereotype of the African as child is honed and Romanticized. James Montgomery's epic
222
poem describes Africa as "these romantic regions" where "dwells the negro, nature's
outcast child." This noble savage exudes "untutor'd grace"; "in his mind . . . desolation
reigns" as it does in Africa's "uncultur'd . . . plains." The African's soul is "involv'd in
thicket night" and in need of enlightenment. Elizabeth Benger's poem in the collection
stresses that the African in the slave colonies wants only to return to Africa; he is "An
alien, far from nature's bosom cast." The poem asks for "a spell the Negro's soul to wean /
From childhood's lov'd traditionary scene." The "Negro" "Yearns to behold his tutelary
tree." Benger's "Negro" is a "child of tradition" who is happiest in Africa with its "rude
civilization common to all nations in their infancy." Benger's "Negro," whether in Africa
or not, is content to live as a child, "to rest / On the same sod his foot in childhood prest."
All he requires exists in the oral tradition of his nation, "the mem'ry of his sires." The
poem ends with a call to Britain to civilize child-like Africa, who is like a pre-Butterfly,
"Its wings unfolded, and its form unclos'd." Benger hopes that Britain will explore and
intervene in African civilization "Till Afric's race in grateful rev'rence bend, / And hail
the teacher where they find the friend."
"The Converted Negro" is a short narrative printed as early as 1811 by the New
York Religious Tract Society. It is anonymous and may have been originally published
by the British Religious Tract Society (founded in 1791?). In either case, it promotes the
perspective of "an English gentleman" who happens to be wandering on "a considerable
plantation" in "the province of New-York" when he encounters and converses with a
slave, "a middle-aged Negro, who was tilling the ground." In the course of their
conversation, during which the slave apparently has two to three hours leisure time to
223
talk, the Englishman learns that the slave has a wife and children but they are taken care
of by his "Massah" and not at all part of the narrative. The narrator's repeatedly
emphasizes that the slave's thinking is Christian, but "artless." Although he has grown up
in New York and taught to read the Bible by his Quaker master, his is "a simple
untutored experience," "artless, savory, solid, unaffected." The slave is happy and
grateful for the Englishman's superior knowledge, "Being rather more acquainted with
the doctrinal truths and the analogy of the Bible" than the slave. While listening to the
Englishman, the "Negro" has an "eager, delighted, animated air and manner." At the end
of the narrative, the narrator contentedly leaves the slave on the plantation, suspended in
his pastoral simplicity.
Reading American colonizationist rhetoric in terms of British Romantic literature
illustrates how American imperialism deployed the imperial vision of Britain to
orchestrate its own early national racialization of American Africans and their
descendants. Thus the ideologies of childhood and Africanity in Uncle Tom's Cabin can
be traced to their British Romantic origins through British and later American
colonizationist rhetoric.
224
Endnotes

1
Alan Richardson, "Colonialism, Race, and Lyric Irony in Blake's 'the Little Black Boy'," Papers on
Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature 26, no. 2 (1990):
246.
2
Ibid., 238.
3
See for example, Caroline Levander and Amy Kaplan.
4
Sarah N. Roth, "The Mind of a Child: Images of African Americans in Early Juvenile Fiction," Journal of
the Early Republic 25 (2005), 79-81.
5
Roth, 93.
6
Marcus Wood, ed., The Poetry of Slavery: An Anglo-American Anthology 1764-1865 (Oxford UP, 2003):
xxxviii.

8
Gary B. Nash and Jean R. Soderlund, Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its
Aftermath (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, 111.
9
Robert H. Bremner, ed., Children and Youth in America: A Documentary History; Volume I (1971).
10
Nash & Soderlund, 103.
11
Lois E. Horton, "From Class to Race in Early America: Northern Post-Emancipation Racial
Reconstruction," in Race and the Early Republic: Racial Consciousness and Nation-Building in the Early
Republic, eds. Michael A. Morrison and James Brewer Stewart (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield,
2002), 69.
12
Nash & Soderlund, 194.
13
Ibid., 167-168.
14
Eric Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society (UP of
Florida, 2005), 1.
15
Ibid., 12.
16
Ann Laura Stoler, "Tense and Tender Ties: North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies,"
Journal of American History 88, no. 3 (2001): 846.
17
David Kazanjian, The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America
(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003), 1.
18
Ibid., 2.
19
Ibid., 5-7, 99.
20
Ibid., 101-103, 120.
21
Ezra Tawil, The Making of Racial Sentiment: Slavery and the Birth of Frontier Romance (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2006), 67.
225

22
Ibid., 9.
23
Ibid., 18-19.
24
Ibid., 35-36.
25
Ibid., 57.
26
Quoted in ibid., 45.
27
Ibid., 56-57.
28
Ibid., 11.
29
One might even conclude that African-American children are consigned to bear the residual, secularized
mark of original sin that Locke removed from the universal child.
30
Joanne Pope Melish, "The "Condition" Debate and Racial Discourse in the Antebellum North," Journal
of the Early Republic 19, no. 4 (1999): 651-72.
31
Tawil, 64-65.
32
See James B. Stewart, "The Emergence of Racial Modernity and the Rise of the White North, 1790-
1840," Journal of the Early Republic 18, no. 2 (1998): 181-217.
33
In his "Preliminary Remarks," he exhorts slave owners to regard their slaves—"that inoffensive and
helpless race of people, whose lot has been cast under their guardianship"—"as constituting a portion of the
admirable works of the same beneficent and omnipresent Parent, Overseer, and Proprietor, of us all."
34
Torrey, 59.
35
Footnote about "colored students": In a footnote, Torrey reprints a notice about "an examination of the
coloured students in Augustine Hall, that will prove that "the sons of the despised and hitherto oppressed
African race, are as capable of improvement as others, and that their upper works are as good, to say no
more, as the youth of any other nation." / Torrey adds: "I attended the examination alluded to above, last
evening, and was much gratified to find that the performances of the young Africans, were such as to
justify the statements of the advertisement. An experienced teacher has affirmed, that their progress has
exceeded that of any boys within his knowledge in an equal time" / [pp25-25]
36
Torrey, 9.
37
Torrey, 28.
38
Ibid., 24-28.
39
Ibid., 27.
40
Ibid., 61.
41
Ibid., 21.
42
Ibid., 25.
43
Ibid., 62.
44
Richardson, 234.
45
Torrey, vii.
226

46
Christopher Castiglia, "Pedagogical Discipline and the Creation of White Citizenship: John Witherspoon,
Robert Finley, and the Colonization Society," Early American Literature 33, no. 2 (1998): 192-214.
47
Amy Kaplan, "Manifest Domesticity," in No More Separate Spheres!, eds. Cathy N. Davidson and
Jessamyn Hatcher (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002), 184.
48
Ibid., 186.
49
Ibid., 193.
50
Ibid., 196.
51
Kazanjian, 92.
52
Ibid., 95.
53
Ibid., 99-100.
54
Martin Brückner, "Lessons in Geography: Maps, Spellers, and Other Grammars of Nationalism in the
Early Republic," American Quarterly 51, no. 2 (1999): 316.
55
Ibid., 325-26.
56
Torrey, 40.
57
Kazanjian, n18.
58
Bill Ashcroft, "Primitive and Wingless: The Colonial Subject as Child," in Dickens and the Children of
Empire, ed. Wendy S. Jacobson (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 184.
59
Ibid., 184-85.
60
Ibid., 185-86.
61
Wallace.
62
Ashcroft, 187.
63
Ibid., 189.
64
Ashton Nichols, "Mumbo Jumbo: Mungo Park and the Rhetoric of Romantic Africa," in Romanticism,
Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780-1834, eds. Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh (Bloomington: Indiana
UP, 1996), 94-95.
65
Ibid., 105.
66
Ibid., 95.
67
Torrey, 79.
68
Richardson, 165.
227
Epilogue: Race and Childhood in Mid-Nineteenth Century American Literature

This speculative epilogue will consider some of the ways that a focus on the
analogy between slaves and children can enhance our understanding of canonical
American literature of the mid-nineteenth century. I will consider three works—
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), The Scarlet
Letter (1850), and Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)—through the prism of the child/slave
analogy and the associated nature/nurture paradigm.
In 1855, Frederick Douglass published a revised and much expanded version of
his well-known 1845 Narrative. This second autobiography, My Bondage and My
Freedom, does not make significant material additions to the earlier narrative in terms of
characters and episodes. Rather, "the whole of his life is rendered with a greater linguistic
and literary sophistication appropriate to Douglass' more mature psychological and
political understanding of his antebellum world and self."
1
In particular, it reflects the
emergence of an American Romanticism.
2

We can see the influence of this Romantic aesthetic in an added discussion of
childhood that did not appear in the 1845 autobiography. In the first chapter of My
Bondage, now entitled "The Author's Childhood,"
3
Douglass emphasizes that there is no
difference between enslaved black children and free white children: "SLAVE-children
are children, and prove no exceptions to the general rule." The "rule" to which Douglass
refers is the transience of childhood sorrow. Despite his narrative's incisive portrayal of
the moral degradation and violence of slavery, he maintains that "It is not even within the
power of slavery to write indelible sorrow . . . over the heart of a child." He follows this
228
claim with four lines from "Rokeby" by Walter Scott that compare children's tears to dew
that evaporates from flower petals,
4
and two relatively unequivocal claims about slavery's
inability to harm children. First he writes that, "There is, after all, but little difference in
the measure of contentment felt by the slave-child neglected and the slaveholder's child
care for and petted," and then he argues that, "the first seven or eight years of the slave-
boy's life are about as full of sweet content as those of the most favored and petted white
children of the slaveholder."
5
Even in view solely of the fact that Douglass was separated
from his mother, denied education, and exposed to the bloody whippings of his Aunt
Hester, these claims about the "sweet content" of slave childhood border on the ludicrous.
One way to understand Douglass' appraisal of slave childhood in My Bondage
and My Freedom is to read it as an example of the biting sarcasm cloaked in innocence of
which he was a master. "The Author's Childhood" ends with a long passage of the "many
troubles" from which the slave-child, unlike the free child, is exempt: "He is never
expected to act like a nice little gentleman, for he is only a rude little slave." In contrast
with the life of "his white brother," the slave-child lives the idealized life of the Romantic
savage/child of nature: "freed from all restraint," he can be "a genuine boy, doing
whatever his boyish nature suggests . . . . He literally runs wild . . . trot[ting] on, in his
joyous and roguish tricks, as happy as any little heathen under the palm trees of Africa."
In this passage, the only people that threaten the slave-child's happiness are the older
slave-boys, and the occasional reminder that the slave-child will one day have a very
difficult life "is soon forgotten; the shadow soon passes, and our sable boy continues to
roll in the dust, or play in the mud, as best suits him, and in the veriest freedom."
6

229
In support of reading "The Author's Childhood" as sarcastic is the fact that it
appears to comment on passages from Uncle Tom's Cabin, which had come to play a
dominant role in popular culture in the decade between Douglass' two versions of his
autobiography. The novel contains a scene in which Eva, having been chided by her
mother for being too intimate with the "servants," feels sorrow for a moment, but then
begins "merrily laughing" when distracted by sights from the coach-window. The
narrator explains that "children, luckily, do not keep to one impression long."
7
This is the
same Eva who will die an untimely and melodramatic death in a few chapters because her
fragile nature cannot tolerate the injustices that surround her on the slave plantation.
Douglass' sable boy rolling in the dust like an African heathen evokes the image of Mose
and Pete rolling and tumbling on the dirt floor of their family's cabin. These two will
soon lose their father, Tom, who will be sold away, never to be seen by his family again,
and eventually beaten to death.
However, reading Douglass' Romanticization of slave childhood as an act of
sarcasm is not completely satisfactory for several reasons. Douglass could not have
hoped that all his readers would note his sarcasm, if indeed he intended it. There certainly
must have been readers that took his claims about the pleasures of slave childhood
literally. In addition, his 1845 Narrative also minimizes the negative effects on young
children of being enslaved, although its claims about slave-child contentment are not at
all as dramatic or Romantic. A close reading of the 1845 Narrative suggests that there
were several important rhetorical reasons for Douglass to play down the trauma of his
230
early years. Recognizing these reasons can help us to better understand some of
Douglass' narrative choices.
I propose that Douglass has several interrelated and overlapping reasons for
discounting the sorrows of the slave-child: He recognized that American children, at best,
had few social, legal, or political rights, that they were subject to the almost absolute
authority of their parents and guardians. Therefore, he suspected that readers would not
be sympathetic to a child who complained of enslavement, and they would be as
intolerant of a slave-child who questioned his powerlessness as they were of the youthful
rebellion of whites. Douglass also recognized that many "free" American children of the
lower-classes lived at or below subsistence level, labored long hours, and received little
to no education. He understood that a description of his childhood in poverty was not in
and of itself sufficient as an argument against slavery. His studied comparison of the
"little gentleman" and the "rude slave boy" in My Bondage keeps the focus away from the
poor white child figure, who is also conspicuously absent from Uncle Tom's Cabin. The
1845 Narrative is careful to stress that even the poorest white boys in Baltimore have
something that the slave boy doesn't: literacy.
In addition, Douglass must have been familiar with the way that the slave-child
analogy was wielded to promote slavery and to perpetuate racial myths of African-
American inferiority. He had every reason to want to emphasize that some slaves were
literally children, but that many were not child-like at all. One way to do this was to
suggest that slave-children were just like free children; the equation implied that slave
children would outgrow childhood just like free children, regardless of how they were
231
treated. Slavery could not, according to this approach, infantilize adult slaves; it could not
turn them into permanent children.
A final related reason that I want to propose has to do with the nature/nurture
paradigm. In a society that accepted the Lockean premise of the child's malleability, the
belief that a child could be permanently deformed his by early experiences held great
currency. This premise created a problematic rhetorical paradox for Douglass: If he
accentuated the difficulty of his childhood, he undermined his authority and credibility as
an adult abolitionist speaker and writer. If his childhood were horribly traumatic, he
would presumed to be incapable of becoming a functional adult. His actual poise and
eloquence in adulthood suggested to many either that childhood in slavery couldn't be all
that bad, and/or that he hadn't actually ever been a slave.
8
However, if Douglass
minimized the trauma of childhood in slavery, he risked Romanticizing it and
inadvertently lending support to the pro-slavery arguments of those who maintained that
even adult African-Americans were child-like (like Stowe's Tom) and therefore suited to
slavery for life. We can see in the 1845 Narrative how Douglass attempts to navigate the
rhetorical minefield created by the slave/child analogy, and how this navigation creates a
subtle layer of incoherence.
Douglass' strategy in the 1845 Narrative with regard to the particular challenges
outlined above of portraying childhood in a slave narrative seems to be to try to have it
both ways: to portray his childhood in slavery as extraordinarily painful and relatively
benign simultaneously. This strategy is encapsulated in one sentence in Chapter V: "I was
seldom whipped by my old master, and suffered little from any thing else than hunger
232
and cold."
9
On one hand, the phrasing, "suffered little," de-emphasizes the hardships of
slavery. Many American children in the early nineteenth century suffered from hunger
and cold. However, the level of physical deprivation that Douglass describes is extreme.
And Douglass' language emphasizes that the resulting marks on his body are the opposite
of "indelible"; rather, the width of the frostbite cracks in his feet recall the instrument the
adult Douglass uses to write his autobiography.
10

In addition, the pivotal sentence quoted above negates the traumatic experiences
that Douglass has described in the first chapter, as if they did not leave "gashes." In
Chapter I, Douglass explains why he doesn't know exactly how old he is, and claims that
this lack of knowledge "was a source of unhappiness to me even during childhood." He
describes how he was separated so early and so completely from his mother that he
reacted to new of her death several years later "with much the same emotions [he] should
probably have felt at the death of a stranger." And he documents how witnessing when
"quite a child" the beating of his Aunt Hester "struck [him] with awful force."
11
Yet, four
chapters later, Douglass claims to have "suffered little from any thing else than hunger
and cold."
The 1845 Narrative further reveals and simultaneously masks childhood suffering
by switching away from the first person point of view at crucial moments. In Chapter V,
Douglass equates his "treatment" on the Lloyd plantation with "that of the other slave
children." With reference to the availability of food, he uses the first person plural: "We
were not regularly allowanced." Yet when he subsequently describes how the slave
children were fed from a trough on the ground "like so many pigs," he uses the third-
233
person: "He that ate fastest got most; he that was strongest secured the best place; and
few left the trough satisfied." This switch in point of view inserts a certain distance
between the young Douglass and the experience of being humiliated by being treated like
a stereotypically dirty, noisy animal. The reader is distracted from visualizing Douglass at
the trough, and from trying to infer whether he was one of the "fastest" or "strongest" and
whether little Douglass "left the trough satisfied." This narrative distance allows the adult
Douglass to describe the humiliations of childhood in slavery without having to identify
them as his own.
12

Douglass' ambiguity regarding his childhood suffering also helps to explain why
the narrative makes it so difficult to figure out what age he is in the scenes he describes.
The Narrative makes many references to Douglass' age, but they are strangely disjointed,
equivocally phrased, and oddly placed. On one level, this strategy underscores the fact
that Douglass never knew his exact age because it was not deemed important to
document—a fact that distinguished his experience from that of the majority of white
children. From an historical perspective, the lack of attention to the slave's precise age
reflected the fact that the slaves served for life and there was no pressing need to know
his or her age in order to calculate the years required by his contract. European children
arriving in the colonies had to serve until reaching a certain age, and thus there was an
incentive to assign them one. Douglass repeatedly emphasizes his inexact knowledge of
his age by using the phrases such as, "about X years old," "probably between X and Y
years old." But Douglass' strategy with regard to documenting his age also obscures his
extreme youth during some of the more traumatic experiences he describes. For example,
234
the reader doesn't learn until Chapter VIII that Douglass was only five when he was first
separated from his grandmother and sent to Lloyd's plantation, where he witnessed
Hester's beating and competed with other slave children for "mush" at the trough.
The Narrative's resistance to figuring overtly the young Douglass as an animal
indicates that the narrator is trying to avoid at least two other rhetorical traps. First, the
narrative resists the association between African-American children and animals that
comes so naturally to whites. The Lockean association between children and non-human
animals is exacerbated when it comes to "negro" children because of the traditional
association between the less "civilized" races and non-human animals. In his version of
the Great Chain of Being, Locke asserts the humanity of whites and places non-European
peoples lower on the chain. Douglass' anecdote about the slave-children fed at the
"trough" exposes the constructedness and hence artificiality of the African-American
child/animal analogy. The children are kept on the brink of starvation. The food is placed
on the ground. The children are denied customary eating utensils, and forced to improvise
with "oystershells," "pieces of shingle," and "naked hands." And then they are "called" to
the food. Douglass' language emphasizes that the children only act "like" pigs because
they are required to, not because it comes "naturally": "The children were then called,
like so many pigs, and like so many pigs they would come and devour the mush." The
repetition of "like so many pigs," calls attention to the metaphorical nature of the
association between slave children and animals. Children are "like" pigs, not literally
pigs. And the only reason they are "like" pigs is because they are orchestrated and
manipulated into acting "like" them.
235
Narrative resistance to the often collapsed distinction between African-American
children and animals also points to another rhetorical strategy: sustaining the dramatic
point that Douglass is first and most significantly treated like an animal in slavery after
he has transitioned from boyhood to manhood.
13
There is a narrative anxiety about the
inability of black children's brutalization to shock readers. The Narrative frames the
memorable scene in Chapter X, in which the sixteen-year-old Douglass resists Covey, the
"negro-breaker," by stressing that Douglass is "a man transformed into a brute!"
14
, and by
lamenting, "O, why was I born a man, of whom to make a brute!"
15
He resists the
assertion that he was a "brute" before he became a "man."
Yet, inserted between these two adjacent references to the way slavery brutalizes
adults, we find the autobiography's only reference to the slave-child analogy. Gazing at
the ships in the Chesapeake Bay, Douglass tempers his longing for freedom and
momentarily reconciles himself to his enslavement by telling himself: "I am not the only
slave in the world. Why should I fret? . . . . Besides, I am but a boy, and all boys are
bound to some one." This thought assuages his agony by collapsing the distinction
between slavery and childhood. It is as if Douglass wants to contain the insidious effects
of the child/slave analogy, the way the analogy makes it so easy to support the
enslavement of the "child-like" African-Americans. At the same time, he is anxious about
arguing that slavery brutalizes children, because the claim threatens to undermine the
distinction between slaves and animals and exile slaves of all ages from the human
family. Only a slave who is not an animal can be brutalized.
236
Although on the one hand, Douglass is "but a boy" at the time of his confrontation
with Covey--"a boy about sixteen years old"--he wants to stress that he became an adult
before he left slavery, that slavery does not infantilize—quite the opposite. He must also
stress his adulthood in order to justify his rebellion against authority. The states of
childhood and slavery are difficult to distinguish since both involve subordination to the
will and authority of adults. As Douglass' reference to the necessary subordination of
childhood implies, there is an important distinction between boyhood and manhood, even
if the two states border each other. Douglass emphasizes this when he writes of Covey:
"He knew by himself just what a man or a boy could do." It is difficult to make the
argument that anyone under the age of twenty-one deserves to be free, or has the right to
rebel against authority. Douglass makes this point earlier in the Narrative when he
complains to the little white boys of Baltimore that they will be free when they turn
twenty-one, but he is a slave "for life." The least controversial aspect of gradual
emancipation plans was certainly that all children of slaves born after a certain date
would remain enslaved until they reached adulthood. The fact that even white children
lacked political rights was what made the child/slave analogy so appealing and
persuasive.
16
American adults easily agreed that children and the child-like deserved and
required total subordination. Douglass' decision to emphasize the way slavery brutalized
adults rather than the way it infantilized them reflects his awareness that the former
charge was much more damning—and easier to refute--than the latter.
17

237
Although Toni Morrison does not discuss The Scarlet Letter (1850) in her analysis of the
"Africanist presence" in American literature, Hawthorne's novel provides persuasive
evidence in support of her argument that, "Even, and especially, when American texts are
not 'about' Africanist presences or characters or narrative or idiom, the shadow hovers in
implication, in sign, in line of demarcation"
18
Hawthorne's story of Hester Prynne's
punishment for adultery contains neither African characters nor references to colonial
slavery. Yet it was written when the issue of slavery was at the forefront of national
consciousness, and it is set in Boston in the mid-1640s, just a few years after the General
Court of Massachusetts first legalized slavery.
19
Within this context, it is suggestive that
the novel obsessively engages the theme of human enslavement, the iconography of
branding, and the imagery of blackness.
20
I will consider the way the novel engages the
question of how the symbolism of childhood and the narrative contours of the
nature/nurture dialectic shape the language of racial subjectivity.
The "shadow" of Africanity in the novel is most literal in "The Custom-House,"
the prefatory essay to The Scarlet Letter that narrates the genesis of the story itself. This
framing narrative contains the only reference to the colonial enslavement of Africans. In
a passage describing the "bustling wharf" of Salem in the eighteenth-century, the narrator
notes that the many ships coming into the port were "usually from Africa or South
America" (89). Just after this nod to the involvement of Massachusetts in the Atlantic
slave trade, the narrator evokes the character, common at the time, of "the smart young
clerk, who gets the taste of traffic as a wolf-cub does of blood," reinforcing the
association between Salem's maritime commerce and the lucrative, violent trade in
238
human cargo that drove it. When the narrator later takes on the inescapable "shame" of
his ancestor, John Hathorne, who was "stain[ed]" by the "blood" of those he condemned
to death in the Salem witchcraft trials, he is also acknowledging, on some level, the stain
of slavery in his and his story's genealogies.
"The Custom-House," which Hawthorne subtitles, an "Introductory to The Scarlet
Letter," is both a narrative of the genesis of Hester Prynne's story, and an
autobiographical narrative of Hawthorne's genesis.
21
The essay evokes the genre of the
slave narrative, typified by Frederick Douglass' 1845 Narrative.
22
Hawthorne's "prison-
house of slavery"
23
is the "custom-house" itself. Like Douglass' enslavement,
Hawthorne's civil service threatens his manhood. He writes, "I endeavoured to calculate
how much longer I could stay in the Custom-House, and yet go forth a man." He
repeatedly argues that civil service brutalizes its inmates. He worries that he will
"become much such another animal as the old Inspector" if he remains for an extended
period of time.
24
The elderly "permanent" Inspector has an "animal nature," and is so
lacking in intelligence, morality and spirituality that he risks "walking on all-fours."
25

Like slavery, public office perpetuates dependence and robs employees of their self-
reliance, "the capability of self support." When the surveyor loses his position, he is no
longer fit for living, and is abandoned "to totter along the difficult footpath of life as he
best may."
26

As the verb "totter" underscores, Hawthorne, unlike Douglass, stresses the
similarities between brutalization and infantilization. The narrator makes this connection
explicit in his portrait of the Inspector, who is both animal-like and "as ready for sport as
239
any unbreeched infant."
27
(98). At the same time, though, Hawthorne's essay questions
the analogical work of comparing adult humans to children. The Inspector ultimately
defies categorization as human: "he seemed—not young, indeed—but a kind of new
contrivance of Mother Nature in the shape of man, whom age and infirmity had no
business to touch." Hawthorne seems to be suggesting here that an infantilized adult is a
monster, not a child. He is exposing the incoherence of comparing adults to children,
implying the question—what is a grown-up child if not a "new contrivance"? We can
read the story of the scarlet letter as, in part, a story about the figure of the child as a
symbol. It has no fixed meaning, and yet it is never without meaning. Ultimately, its
meaning reflects the interpretive work of its readers.
Pearl's childishness inheres in her ability to symbolize whatever the text needs her
to represent. Her character challenges contemporary notions of childhood that stressed
that children are inherently a certain way—inherently sinful or willful or good. Pearl is a
blank slate in that she can be inscribed with meaning by those who observe her. But at the
same time she defies any assigned meaning by engendering multiple readings
simultaneously. Children are no more stable referents than letters of the alphabet.
Hawthorne's text indirectly questions the child figure's role in stabilizing meaning
through analogy and in telling us anything about nature as distinct from nurture. A
discursive system that attempts to define, for example, the character of African-
Americans through an analogy with children can only be entirely fictional, since the child
figure's meaning only exists through its association with one or more imposed narratives.
The child represents nothing so much as the dubious and shifting ground of symbols
240
themselves, and the endless rhetorical displacements to which meaning is indebted.
Hawthorne's text suggests that the modern project of isolating nature from nurture
through an investigation of the child is a fruitless endeavor that can only reveal the
impossibility of fixed meaning. If the meaning of racial difference depends on fixing the
child's nature, then race is clearly as fictional as childhood.
In the wake of American Romanticism,
28
the rhetorical figure of the child had
become a symbol of innocence and purity. We can see an implied critique of this trend in
Hawthorne's portrayal of Pearl. Above all, Pearl is not pure. She cannot be reduced to one
meaning, one genealogy, or even one race. By implication, Pearl's story challenges the
notion of purity that inheres in the culture's definition of whiteness. As "The Custom-
House" emphasizes, it is impossible to separate nature from nurture. Human identity is
produced both by ancestry and by environment, by "blood" and by "soil," and in the
cemetery, the blood mixes with the soil.

"Soil" in Hawthorne can be more or less polluted
by ancestors and/or "worn-out," but it is never neutral. And what soil contains never can
be precisely known. Twice the narrator points out that Pearl is not completely white.
Despite her name, Pearl's "aspect" has "nothing of the calm, white, unimpassioned luster
that would be indicated by the comparison" (148-149). Pearl's identity, her "own proper
beauty," derives from the fact that she is not a completely blank or white surface to be
inscribed. The narrator insists that is she were "paler" she would be "extinguished" by the
way her mother dresses her, "she would have ceased to be herself." What makes Pearl
Pearl is "a certain depth of hue." She illustrates "infinite variety," and multiple
subjectivities: "in this one child there were many children."
29

241
Pearl accrues meaning and subjectivity from the acts of interpretation of those
who observe her. Her meaning exists in the eyes of her beholders, and varies according to
their cultural and historical standpoints. In the scene in which Pearl cavorts among the
observers of the Election Sermon, the Puritans regard her as "a demon offspring," the
Indian sees her as "a nature wilder than his own," and the sailors see in her "a flake of the
sea-foam" (259). Observers see in Pearl what they want to see, and observe her to
discover what they hope or fear to know. Throughout the narrative, the narrator and the
other characters study Pearl for the signs of her adulterous origins. Hester studies Pearl
for indications of her own "evil" behavior.
30
Roger Chillingworth wonders aloud if the
"child's nature" can "give a shrewd guess at the father."
31
Reverend Dimmesdale
hallucinates that Pearl identifies him as her father, by "pointing her forefinger, first, at the
scarlet letter on [Hester's] bosom, and then at [his] own breast.
32
Part of the tension of the
narrative stems from Pearl's unpredictability as a symbol. Will she or can she identify the
Reverend as her biological father?
Hawthorne's narrative suggests that what makes Pearl such a fluid and dynamic
symbol is her public disassociation from her father and the law. Pearl's confounded
genealogy is what facilitates her role as a symbol. The text insists on equating Pearl with
the scarlet letter that Hester must wear on her bosom. Just as the "A" can stand for
multiple and often conflicting meanings (e.g. adultery, able, American, Arthur), the
character of Pearl can stand for multiple and conflicting origins. Pairing Pearl repeatedly
with watery reflections, the text emphasizes that Pearl is chameleon-like. She mirrors the
characteristics and feelings of different parents at different times. She absorbs Hester's
242
inner turmoil while in the prison, she acts out Dimmesdale's burning desire to expose his
sin, she acknowledges Chillingworth's affinity with evil, and she embodies the
supernatural witchcraft of the Black Man. Like Douglass, Pearl has no publicly
acknowledged father, and her identification of him is not enough to make him her father
by law. Unlike Hawthorne the author, Pearl is divorced from the weight of her English
ancestry and the laws of heredity, "as if she had been made afresh, out of new elements,
and must perforce be permitted to live her own life, and be a law unto herself."
33
Pearl
herself tells the governor that she doesn't have human progenitors, that she "had been
plucked by her mother off the bush of wild roses, that grew by the prison-door."
34
And
we know from the opening of the story, that the origins of this rose-bush are unknown.
35

In a sense, Pearl has multiple fathers, including Reverend Dimmesdale, Roger
Chillingworth, the Governor, and the Black Man. Pearl's impurity stems from the
promiscuous blend of genealogies that have produced her and the patriarchal dissonance
that is the result. Nature and nurture have been hopelessly confounded in her case.
In tension with Pearl's freedom from the law is the fact that she only appears fully
human once in the narrative, at the moment that she tearfully kisses Dimmesdale and
recognizes him as her father: "her tears" falling "upon her father's cheek" are "the pledge
that she would grow up amid human joy and sorrow."
36
It is at this moment that Pearl is
most accessible to readers. All through the narrative, Pearl has hovered between being a
"real child" and "child's spirit."
37
Up until this point she has lacked the "disease of
sadness" that other children inherit "from the troubles of their ancestors": "She wanted . .
. a grief that should deeply touch her, and thus humanize her and make her capable of
243
sympathy."
38
However, Pearl's humanity as a child is momentary. Hester and Pearl
disappear from the scene. Hester returns years later, but the reader never learns anything
definite about Pearl again. Pearl has once again been reduced to indefinite symbols. The
reader is left to decide whether or not the letters that Hester receives are from Pearl,
whether or not the baby clothing Hester sews is for a child of Pearl's. In short, the reader
has to wonder whether or not the "trifles," "little ornaments," and "beautiful tokens of
continual remembrance" in Hester's cottage are signs of Pearl's continued existence. And
if they are, what do the say about Pearl's life story?

Hawthorne's narrative raises a critical question about the slave/child analogy: How can
the child figure define another subjectivity when it is itself at once so overdetermined and
indeterminate? What are we saying about slaves and African-Americans when we
compare them to children? This question becomes particularly acute in Uncle Tom's
Cabin, a text famous both for its racialized child characters and its use of the child/slave
analogy. Stowe's novel references both Douglass's child-self and Hawthorne' Pearl. But
Stowe does not resist using the child-figure to determine racial subjectivity. At many
points, the narrator of Uncle Tom's Cabin seems sure that the child by nature has fixed
characteristics that can be used to illuminate the subjectivity of the African-American.
What is the most surprising is that her child characters are not endowed with any of these
childish characteristics.
Topsy is a mix of Douglass and Pearl. Like the young Douglass, Topsy doesn't
know who her parents are and has grown up with little parental care. In response to
244
questions about her origins, she reveals that she doesn't know how old she is, and that she
"never had no father nor mother, nor nothing." In a reworking of Pearl's response to being
asked who made her, Topsy answers the same question with a bemused speculation: "I
spect I grow'd. Don't think nobody never made me." Topsy arrives at the Shelby
plantation "dreadfully dirty, and half naked" and covered with scars like Douglass. But
she is also humorous, provocative, and partly supernatural like Pearl. Topsy isn't anything
like the child figure implied by the child/slave analogy. The phrases that the novel's
narrator associates with the "childlike" African "race" emphasize docility--the desire and
capacity to be subjected and subordinated. The "race" is "home-loving and affectionate,"
"naturally patient, timid and unenterprising," "gentle," "soft," "impressible," "kindly,"
"sensitive," and "susceptible." Paradoxically, the main characteristic of the race is that it
has no defining and permanent character.
39
Stowe represents the African as fungible,
40

capable of being whatever white people want or need.
Stowe's definition of race effectively collapses the distinction between nature and
nurture—nature is nurture. We see this most clearly in the famous scene in which the
narrative presents Eva and Topsy as simultaneously "representatives of two extremes of
society" and "representatives of their races": "The Saxon, born of ages of cultivation,
command, education, physical and moral eminence; the Afric, born of ages of oppression,
submission, ignorance, toil, and vice!."
41
On one hand, each child is born a particular
"race," a move which connotes a belief in racial essentialism. What intangible connects
Topsy, raised by a southern slave trader, to a person born and raised in Africa other than
dark pigmentation? On the other, the "racial" characteristics are all linked to external
245
conditions, not physical features. Here, race is directly equated with social status. The
traits that Stowe calls "natural" are more evidently the product of environment. Given
that the reader already knows how differently Eva and Topsy were raised, this scene begs
the question of heredity. What have the two girls inherited beyond a particular position in
society? For all the narrator's talk about racial difference traveling through the blood, this
scene all but rejects racial essentialism. How does one inherit "cultivation" other than by
being cultivated?
Stowe's use of the child/slave analogy deconstructs itself over the course of the
narrative because the child figure itself is a moving target. Similarly, the nature/nurture
distinction cannot be sustained since it is far from clear what comes naturally either to
Eva or Topsy. At most we can say, as Uncle Tom's Cabin does, that child characters
operate as representations of ideas and sites of speculation, always referring beyond
themselves to the discourses to which they are subject.

246
Endnotes

1
John S. Wright, "Introduction," in My Bondage and My Freedom. By Frederick Douglass. 1855. (New
York: Washington Square Press, 2003), xxi-xxii.
2
Ibid., vii.
3
Chapters in the 1845 Narrative are numbered but do not have titles.
4
"The tear down childhood's cheek that flows,/ Is like the dew-drop on the rose--/ When next the summer
breeze comes by,/ And waves the bush—the flower is dry."
5
Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York, 1855), The Givens Collection (2003), 25-
26.
6
Ibid., 26-27.
7
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (Cleveland, OH, 1852), A Norton Critical Edition (1994),
158.
8
John Stauffer, "Frederick Douglass's Self-Fashioning and the Making of a Representative American
Man," in The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative, ed. Audrey Fisch
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), 202.
9
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), Penguin
Classics (1986), 71.
10
Ibid., 71-72.
11
Ibid., 47-49.
12
Another example of this strategic shift in point of view occurs in Chapter I. Douglass uses the first person
when discussing the fact that his father was white and probably also his master. A few paragraphs later, he
switches to the third person when generalizing about how much more difficult slavery is for "mulatto
children" than it is for "black slaves," particularly if they are offspring of their masters, 49.
13
In another telling example, Douglass shifts away from the first person in his description of the day during
which the value of the slaves and livestock are assessed. First he writes in the first person plural, "We were
all ranked together at the valuation." Immediately after, he switches to the third person: "Men and women,
old and young, married and single, were ranked with horses, sheep, and swine. There were horses and men,
cattle and women, pigs and children, all holding the same rank in the scale of being, and were all subjected
to the same narrow examination. . . . At this moment, I saw more clearly than ever the brutalizing effects of
slavery upon both slave and slaveholder," 90.
14
Douglass, Narrative, 105.
15
Ibid., 106.
16
See for example George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South, or the Failure of Free Society (Richmond: A
Morris, 1854): "Would the abolitionists approve of a system of society that set white children free, and
remitted them at the age of fourteen, males and females, to all the rights, both as to person and property,
which belong to adults? Would it be criminal or praiseworthy to do so? Criminal, of course. Now, are the
average of negroes equal in information, in native intelligence, in prudence or providence, to well-informed
white children of fourteen? We who have lived with them for forty years, think not."
247

17
The seriousness of the charge of brutalization also reflects the nature of Christian rhetoric. All Christians
are God's "children," but the Bible emphasizes that there are significant differences between humans and
animals, the most important being that humans, unlike animals, have souls. For the insidious ways in which
according slaves "human" characteristics increases their subjection, see Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of
Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford UP, 1997).
18
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
UP, 1992), 47. Other scholars have applied Morrison's work to The Scarlet Letter. However, none to my
knowledge has focused on the issue of childhood. See, for example, Leland S. Person, "The Dark Labyrinth
of Mind: Hawthorne, Hester, and the Ironies of Racial Mothering," Studies in American Fiction (2001): 33-
48, and Jean Fagan Yellin, "Hawthorne and the Slavery Question," in A Historical Guide to Nathaniel
Hawthorne, ed. Larry J. Reynolds (2001).
19
Betty Wood, Slavery in Colonial America, 1619-1776 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 12-13.
20
Yellin, 153-155.
21
Hawthorne essay is a response to a rare "autobiographical impulse" (87).
22
There are other similarities between "The Custom-House" and the slave narrative that I do not discuss in
this essay, including Hawthorne's focus on his own genealogy, the extent to which he represents his "race,"
the relative influence of his "blood" and his environment on his character, and the authenticity of his
narrative.
23
Douglass, Narrative, 121.
24
Hawthorne, "The Custom-House," 113-114.
25
Ibid., 97.
26
Ibid., 113.
27
Ibid., 98.
28
The Scarlet Letter is subtitled, "a Romance." In "The Custom-House," Hawthorne describes how he has
left his association with the American Transcendentalists behind (102-103).
29
Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, 148-49.
30
Ibid, 149.
31
Ibid., 169.
32
Ibid., 190.
33
Ibid., 183.
34
Ibid, 164.
35
Ibid., 119-120.
36
Ibid., 267.
37
Ibid., 231.
38
Ibid., 217.
248

39
My argument is similar to the one that Ezra Tawil makes in The Making of Racial Sentiment: Slavery and
the Birth of Frontier Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006). However, I focus on the relationship of
this argument to the child/slave analogy in particular, and on the differences between the blank slate of
childhood and the blank slate of Africanity.
40
See Saidiya Hartman's discussion of fungibility in Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making
in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford UP, 1997).
41
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), A Norton Critical Edition (1994), 213.
249
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Creator Hodgson, Lucia (author)

Core Title Nature, nurture, nation: race and childhood in transatlantic American discourses of slavery

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 07/14/2009

Defense Date 05/06/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Childhood,Enlightenment,OAI-PMH Harvest,Race,romanticism,Slavery,transatlanticism

Place Name USA (countries)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Kaplan, Carla (committee chair), Rowe, John Carlos (committee chair), Boone, Joseph Allen (committee member), Halttunen, Karen (committee member)

Creator Email lhodgson@usc.edu,luciakhodgson@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2357

Unique identifier UC1152831

Identifier etd-Hodgson-3080 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-578900 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2357 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Hodgson-3080.pdf

Dmrecord 578900

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Hodgson, Lucia

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu