Reviewed by Melvin Yazawa | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.3

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Reviewed by Melvin Yazawa | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Chasing Shadows: Children and the Transformation of Authority in the Americas

Melvin Yazawa, University of New Mexico

By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority. By Holly Brewer. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. 408 pages. $39.95 (cloth). Children and the Criminal Law in Connecticut, 1635–1855: Changing Perceptions of Childhood. By Nancy Hathaway Steenburg. Studies in American Popular History and Culture. New York: Routledge, 2005. 270 pages. $85.00 (cloth). Children of the Father King: Youth, Authority, and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima. By Bianca Premo. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. 350 pages. $59.95 (cloth), $24.95 (paper).
"We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot," Simon Schama once wrote of the historians' task of reconstructing a "dead world." When such a reconstruction must rely on documentation that is not only incomplete but also filtered through the thoughts and actions of others far removed, that difficulty is compounded. But Holly Brewer, Nancy Hathaway Steenburg, and Bianca Premo demonstrate that chasing after retreating shadows need not be a fool's errand. Each examines the status of children in a world of adults by analyzing the bases of legitimate authority and the legal repercussions of changes in adult perceptions of minors. Their conclusions may differ, and indeed their interpretations are sometimes at odds with one another, yet these differences are unavoidable and perhaps even welcome, in part because they indicate the distance historians have traveled since Philippe Ariès first wrote about "the discovery of childhood."¹	1
By Birth or Consent is an intellectual feast; it is deeply learned and provocative. Because a bare summary cannot possibly do it justice, I will highlight Brewer's thesis and then proceed to a more detailed consideration of one aspect of her multifaceted argument. According to Brewer the basis of legitimate power in England and America was fundamentally altered during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A "paradigm shift, from authority based on birthright to authority based on reasoned consent" affected everyone, but its scope "can be fully understood only by focusing on the child" (5). Indeed, Brewer argues, only by concentrating on the status of children can we begin to appreciate the true nature of the Age of Reason and the American Revolution. Under the old patriarchal political order, children could give away their property at age four, enter into labor contracts at five, marry at seven, be hanged at eight, vote at twelve, and serve on juries at fourteen. By the early nineteenth century, not only were actions such as these subject to legal restraints but most people had come to view them as absurd.	2
This "shift in the boundaries of acceptability" (9) resulted from a reconfiguration of prevailing assumptions about the capacity of children to act on their own behalf. Before the shift age was irrelevant. "Status trumped age" (197), and accountability and responsibility were determined by inherited authority. After the shift a "pattern of age trumping rank" (342) predominated because consent came to occupy a central place in nearly every category of legal identity. The perceived inability of children to render "meaningful consent" (8) resulted in age-specific qualifications that excluded them from most civic privileges and supplied them with special protections with respect to nurturing, education, and criminal liability. Increasingly during the eighteenth century, first in England and then in the colonies, children under fourteen were disqualified from testifying in court, for example, because they lacked the understanding needed to appreciate the solemn nature of an oath, and they were also protected against criminal prosecution under adult codes for essentially the same reason; that is, they lacked the understanding needed to comprehend the consequences of their actions.	. . .

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