Abstract
Historians of American chattel slavery, childhood, and African American history have extensively examined the experiences of enslaved children in the South during the first half of the nineteenth century –– Antebellum America. They have centered their narratives of enslaved children around the harsh realities imposed by the institution of slavery. Consequently, this prevailing framework effectively suggests that enslaved children had no childhood, as the institution of slavery systematically stole their formative years. My thesis challenges this paradigm. In (En)slaved Children are Children: A History of Enslaved Children in the Antebellum American South, I tell the gripping story of black enslaved children and their role in creating and shaping their own culture during this period. To emphasize their agency as crucial to their history, I incorporate the actual voices of enslaved children who experienced, witnessed, and narrated their lives in slavery."To complement these voices, I draw on a corpus of adult recollections that detail their experiences as children.
Additionally, I compared these sources with accounts from fugitive advertisements in nineteenth-century Southern newspapers. I also use physical materials, such as playthings, and intangible cultural products like songs collected from folklore spontaneously composed by children. Overall, my work is an attempt at writing a child-centric history of enslaved children—not merely as victims of the institution of slavery, but as children whose experiences were embedded in slavery.