Born in Bondage: Growing up Enslaved in the Antebellum South

Abstract

Well before the nineteenth century, most North American slaves were enslaved at birth, by birth to a slave mother. That elemental fact had profoundly important consequences for individual slaves, for the institution of slavery, and for the United States. Millions of babies born to slave women made American slavery distinctively homegrown. In Born in Bondage, Marie Jenkins Schwartz, a historian at the University of Rhode Island, focuses principally on the influence of slavery on children rather than vice versa. Unlike Frederick Douglass—who emphasized in My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) that slavery repressed natural human traits, forcing children, so to speak, to grow down—Schwartz portrays slave children growing up robust and resilient. Chapters explore the basic developmental stages of childhood, from birth and infancy through socialization and education in the slave quarters to maturity as workers confronting the risks of sale and separation from kin as well as the prospects of love, marriage, and parenthood. Throughout, Schwartz examines the tensions created by the conflicting demands on slave children made by their parents and their owners. In general, Schwartz argues that slave adults did as much as possible to protect their children within “a cultural space apart from that inhabited by the owning class.” To maintain that cultural space, slave adults not only negotiated with masters but constantly posed the threat of collective action “that threatened financial ruin” for owners. Schwartz declares, for example, “Generally, the presence of caring relatives and friends capable of taking action was enough to worry owners about possible reprisals for subjecting a pregnant woman to especially abusive treatment.” Schwartz makes clear that slave adults could not overcome owners' power to rupture family ties by selling children away from their parents, but, on the whole, “Maintaining a cultural space within the family, defined separately from their owners' plantation households, gave slaves a means of creating identities for themselves.”

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