Review

General Books

Marie Jenkins Schwartz has made a major contribution to the historiography of American slavery with her Born in Bondage. She makes extensive use of the WPA ex-slave narratives, planters papers from several archives, and the H. C. Nixon questionnaire on Alabama slavery (1912-13), to paint a vivid picture of the lives of children growing up in the shadow of slavery. Schwartz seeks to extend the discussion of child slaves that has been framed by Thomas L. Webber (Deep Like the Rivers, 1978) and Wilma King (Stolen Childhood, 1995). Webber and King presented two very different pictures of how the institution of slavery affected child slaves. While Webber suggested that slave parents were able to shelter and nurture children prior to their entering the fields, King presented a much bleaker picture of slave children who were not shielded and who were deeply traumatized by the brutality of the slave regime. These two works in many ways recall the debate between Eugene Genovese and Stanley Elkins. Schwartz's contribution is to break out of the old debate by presenting a fresh, vivid, and complex picture of the lives of child slaves. Her "purpose" in writing the books is to understand how children "endured the conditions associated with chattel bondage." To do so, Schwartz examines "paternalism from the slave quarter" in order "to determine how parents cultivated or resisted paternalistic influences" (p. 14). Her final goal is to describe clearly the stages of slave childhood from birth to the assumption of adult duties.	1
The strength of Born in Bondage is that Schwartz is able to analyze a complex set of relationships that governed parenting of slave children on plantations and farms. Rather than seeing complete autonomy in parenting for slave parents or planter domination of childrearing, Schwartz is able to describe a complex and varied set of interactions between the two extremes that is characterized by give and take and limit testing. Her analysis rings true. Owners at turns give gifts and coddle young slave children. The capacity of owners to give gifts and privileges to young slave children, however, served to undermine the authority of parents. Parents, for their part, at times welcomed paternalistic affection for their children from the master and mistress, but sought to teach children that their authority was supreme. Masters attempted at times to get children to spy on social life in the slave quarters and parents cautioned their children to watch what they said to their masters. Parents taught children deferential behavior to win the favor of owners, but they could not protect their young charges from witnessing brutal punishments meted out to those who challenged the authority of overseers and masters. An additional strength of Born in Bondage is Schwartz's detailed description of the process of growing up in slavery. She identifies several stages and divides her discussion of each stage into a chapter. Schwartz describes these stages as birth, young children in the quarter, a gray area between seven and thirteen when slave children gradually assume greater responsibilities in the quarter or the big house, and a time when children begin working in the fields, but are not expected to produce as adults. All of these stages are thoroughly documented using interviews and papers from three areas in the South: the Virginia piedmont, lowland South Carolina, and Alabama's black belt. Schwartz ends her description of slave children with two thematic chapters. In the first she discusses the very real threat of sales on family stability and the lives of children and in the second she offers a very nuanced treatment of love and marriage.	2
In sum, Schwartz makes a major contribution to our understanding of childhood under slavery. Her book, however, has a few shortcomings. She focuses on areas of the South where large plantations predominated. Although she makes passing references to the experience of child slaves in areas dominated by small farms (pp. 53, 65, 196), she does not present enough evidence on these areas to establish any firm patterns. Likewise, she neglects contrasting slavery on old and new western cotton frontiers. Alabama is supposed to serve this purpose for her study, but she might have done well to extend her study by contrasting the 1860 frontiers of Missouri and Texas, for example, to determine if any additional patterns could be identified. Schwartz also does not examine the lives of child slaves in urban areas. In short, her publisher was probably more interested in expanding the scope of her study than she was in order to appeal to a broader audience. Finally, with the exception of her final two thematic units, the Alabama sources tend to be used more often. This might be due to the fact that most of the Alabama WPA interviews are centered on the experience of slavery in the black belt and in Alabama she had an additional major source: the Nixon interviews. In any event, the Alabama sources seem to be over represented. Despite these shortcomings, Schwartz has blazed a trail that many graduate students can develop with additional comparative studies of slavery's impact on slave children. Students find this topic to be very interesting. I shared some of the evidence presented in the book with my tenth graders and they wanted to learn more. The photo essay that recapitulates the stages of the development of enslaved children is a very useful tool to begin to discuss the topic. In conclusion, Born in Bondage is a must read for those who want to help their students to begin to understand the inhumanity of slavery. We cannot begin to understand slavery unless we understand how it impacted the most vulnerable slaves.	3
Malcolm Price Laboratory School and the University of Northern Iowa Paul Horton

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