Book Review: Young Abolitionists: Children of the Antislavery Movement
Young Abolitionists: Children of the Antislavery Movement. By Michael Roy. New York: New York University Press, 2024. Hardcover, 264 pp. $40.00.
Reviewed by Tim Talbott
The efforts and potential power of young people to influence change across time in the United States, whether that be social, cultural, or political, is a subject area that is finally getting more attention among scholars. During the twentieth century, as well as our present one, youth movements have had a significant impact on cultural changes and are perhaps most easily seen (or heard) through music, such as the emergence and popular rise of rock and roll in the 1950s and 60s and hip hop in the 1970s and 80s. Young people have also played prominent roles in social and political reform efforts such as the Civil Rights Movement and protests against environmental threats. These more modern initiatives are the descendants of earlier movements that also involved young people.
In an era before expanded governmental regulation, efforts to change society in nineteenth-century America often had roots in the nation’s evolving industrialization and capitalism. Children joined adults to protest child labor exploitation as far back as the 1830s, and as Michael Roy clearly shows in his recently published, Young Abolitionists: Children of the Antislavery Movement, some of that period’s youth also worked to see the peculiar institution abolished.
As Roy explains in his Introduction, among other activities, “Children recited antislavery speeches at school; they joined antislavery societies; they assisted in the editing of antislavery newspapers and in aiding fugitive slaves; they attended antislavery fairs and participated in programs to honor the memory of John Brown; they raised money to finance antislavery lecturers’ international travels; they even signed antislavery petitions, testing the limits of their citizenship.” (5) And although, as one might imagine, children usually first learned about slavery and abolition through adults, their acts and the words they left behind, as Roy shows, “Children . . . soon came to develop their own understandings of abolition, deploying surprising degrees of agency in the process.” (6)
Also in the introduction, Roy helpfully provides readers some focus with the otherwise vague terms: children, youth, and young. While within the book Roy discusses “children as young as two and some in their late teens,” the majority of his examples “are between seven and fifteen. A child, for the purpose of [his] study, is anyone who was regarded as such by their contemporaries or who self-identified as a child.” (9)
Along with the aforementioned Introduction, Roy organizes Young Abolitionists into five chapters and an Epilogue. The chapters cover: the beginnings of juvenile abolitionism, juvenile antislavery literature, organizing juvenile abolitionists, abolition in schools, and antislavery families. Chapter 1. “’What Can Children Do for the Slaves’: The Origins of Juvenile Abolitionism,” was of particular interest. Roy argues that juvenile abolitionism “traced its roots to juvenile acts of slave resistance” and “less radical reform movements such as temperance. . . .” In the slave states, like enslaved adults, children resisted by both overt and covert methods. Running away, hiding tools, feigning sickness, and back-talking and mocking enslavers when they were not around were all forms of resistance. In northern states where slavery was gradually abolished, Black children who were apprenticed or awaited their freedom dates, attempted to speed their emancipation through individual lawsuits and appeals to white patrons. As was the case with temperance reformers, Roy explains, children were valued as moral agents of change and viewed as “the promise of a better future. . . .” (25)
Each informative chapter makes use of important and largely previously unexplored primary sources including student speeches, submissions to abolitionist periodicals, petitions, both private and open letters, journals, youth antislavery society minutes, children’s literature and textbooks, and pamphlets. The thorough and lengthy notes and bibliography sections at the end of the book provide evidence of Roy’s depth of research. Additionally, over 20 images throughout the study provide visuals to support the points the author makes.
Antislavery children clearly saw the institution as something that either they or their children would ultimately have to reckon with. They took their opposition to it seriously, and as evidence shows, their writings, organizing, and actions both buoyed their adult supporters and infuriated their adult opponents.
Young Abolitionists: Children of the Antislavery Movement makes a most welcome addition to the historiography of abolitionism. Readers will find it helpful to better understand the diverse influence that the abolitionists, who were perhaps small in number but extremely vocal and well politically connected, had on changing the United States.
