"You ought to have seen her face & eyes [when] I gave her the pretty white glass beads which I had bought for her," wrote the northern-born Tryphena Blanche Holder Fox in 1860 of Adelaide, a seven-year-old houseservant.(n1) It was difficult to tell who was more delighted, the donor or recipient. In contrast, Harriet Jacobs, speaking of her difficult relationship with her owners when she was 14, recalled, "I resolved never to be conquered."(n2) Such comments speak volumes about the disparate interactions between slaveowners and slave children. Conditions for slave children in the antebellum South varied widely, and study of their varying experiences is essential to understanding both their personality development and socialization as they learned and practiced behavior appropriate for children and for slaves. As Willie Lee Rose pointed out in 1982, "few historians have stressed this aspect of slavery, or described it adequately."(n3) Since then, this void has been partially redressed by Steven Mintz's African American Voices, which in the chapter "Childhood" recounts the experiences of three exslave men, and my own Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America.(n4)

The present study takes a further step by examining the lives of slave children in five professional households using the critical factors suggested by Eugene D. Genovese to compare slave conditions and determine distinctions among slave children. These factors are: 1) "day-to-day living conditions," referring to food, clothing, shelter, and working conditions; 2) "conditions of life," encompassing family security, opportunities for independent social and religious life, and cultural development; and 3) "access to freedom and citizenship."(n5) While the conditions, treatment, and reactions of the slave children under study differed widely, the children experienced many of the same abuses suffered by their contemporaries elsewhere on plantations in the antebellum South. Examination of their lives provides insight into the difficult path they negotiated, subject to arbitrary punishment, abuse, and separation from family, and into the coping strategies they used to survive.

Sources available for studying the lives of slave children vary greatly, from firsthand written accounts to secondhand correspondence to oral family tradition. Adelaide, the young girl who received the beads, together with several siblings and her mother Susan, were owned by David Raymond Fox, a physician in rural Jesuit Bend, Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana. While neither Adelaide nor Susan kept any records of their lives, Adelaide figured prominently in the correspondence of the doctor's wife Tryphena Fox between 1854 and 1864, and her letters are the source for the Fox narrative.

By contrast, Harriet Jacobs in 1861 published a detailed account of her life as a slave from 1825 to 1835 in the small-town household of James Norcom, a medical doctor in Edenton, Chowan County, North Carolina Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, written under the pseudonym Linda Brent, has received much attention by scholars of American slavery. Unlike other sieve narratives, it does not recount Harriet's entire life but only specific incidents, particularly how she confronted sexual harassment and exploitation. Earlier scholars doubted the book's authenticity because of the pen name and its seemingly incredible claims, but reservations have now subsided. In 1987 Jean Fagan Yellin documented much of Jacobs's story through the use of archival resources and by comparison with the account of John S. Jacobs, Harriet's younger brother, "A True Tale of Slavery," which appeared in England's The Leisure Hour in February 1861.(n6)

The story of Cornelia Smith opens a window into the lives of five slave children in the North Carolina household of James Smith, a medical doctor and politician. Although she herself was well treated, Cornelia's birth was the result of her mother's brutal rape by James's son Sidney Smith. Thus, Cornelia's place in the household of a prominent doctor and state legislator was part of a tangled relationship that crossed color and class lines. Cornelia's story is told by her granddaughter, Pauli Murray, in Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family. Murray blended historical research with personal recollections to shape the narrative of her youth in the home of her maternal grandparents, where, as a young girl, Murray reamed about the childhood of her slave-loom grandmother Cornelia.(n7)

Imogene and Adaline Johnson were the daughters of Kentucky attorney Richard M. Johnson and Johnson's slave Julia Chinn. Johnson was an officer and veteran of the War of 1812 who served as a U.S. Congressman, and from 1837 to 1841 he was vice president under Martin Van Buren. Most unusually, Johnson treated Julia virtually as his wife; she was the mistress of his household, and he openly acknowledged paternity of their daughters. The story of Richard Johnson's slave family is told in The Life and Times of Colonel Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky, written by Leland Winfield Meyer.(n8)

The final case concerns three brothers, Archibald, Francis, and John Grimke, sons of Nancy Weston, a mulatto slave woman, and Henry Grimke, a successful Charleston, South Carolina lawyer, whose union was apparently consensual. The children grew up in a quasi-free state even after their father's untimely death, until Grimke's adult son Montague claimed them for his own house slaves. Archibald and Francis resisted and eventually fought their way to freedom, becoming prominent American citizens. The account of the Grimke brothers' upbringing is part of the biography Archibald Grimle: Portrait of a Black Independent, by Dickson D. Bruce Jr.(n9)

The well-known interviews collected in the 1930s by federal workers, known collectively as the Works Progress Administration (WPA) narratives, were used only peripherally in this study because they generally lack a sustained voice or discussion of youth in professional households comparable to those in Jacobs's Incidents or Murray's Proud Shoes.(n10) Admittedly, the resources used in this study are uneven and sometimes reveal more about slaveholders than their slaves. But despite these limitations, when combined, the accounts provide insight into the treatment of 20 children in several professional households across geographical regions from North Carolina to Louisiana. While the sample is too small to be certain that it accurately represents the majority of slaveholding professional households, it does reflect the intricacies of bondage for slaveowners and their chattel.

The Fox correspondence reveals much about owning young slaves in the antebellum South. Dr. Fox's interest in buying slaves came in late 1857 when his wife reported the purchase of Susan and her two children, five-year-old Adelaide and her three-year-old sister Margaret. Fox deemed the $1,400 price an excellent bargain, as Susan was pregnant and her son Buddy's birth on 2 February 1858 would enhance the doctor's investment. Tryphena Fox acknowledged that Adelaide and her siblings added to her cares, but "having invested so much in one purchase" it was in the Foxes' interest to see that they were "well taken care of & clothed and fed." Dr. Fox completed the transaction in January 1858, and the bond family moved to Hygiene, his home located in the sugar growing region of Louisiana His holdings increased over time as Susan gave birth to three additional children, and the doctor purchased another slave, the teenaged Maria, in 1860. The physical conditions under which the Fox slaves lived were adequate and probably better than those of many of their contemporaries. In 1858 Dr. Fox built a separate cabin standing several feet above the ground "with a fireplace on account of [Susan] having young children."(n11)

Slaves increased m value as they matured. Children were initially valued as one-quarter or one-half hands, but as they grew older they became substitutes for adult laborers and eventually replaced them. Females in childbearing years added a welcome dimension to ownership, as both production and reproduction were important. "The extent to which the slaveowner consciously emphasized one or the other," historian Deborah Gray White posits, "ultimately depended on his need"(n12)

The slaveholder's priorities also determined the age when slave children began to work and the jobs they performed. Knowing that their offspring were subject to arbitrary authority, punishments, and possible separations, enslaved parents shielded children by teaching them how to work satisfactorily and to survive within a slave culture. This process of adaptation can be seen in several of the case histories under study.

Adelaide, who began working in the Fox home when she was seven years old, was responsible for chores similar to those of her contemporaries in other slave-owning households. She ran errands, entertained the owner's child with games and toys, and helped to feed the chickens and dudes. Adelaide also worked in Tryphena Fox's vegetable garden and probably assisted her own mother in the kitchen.

The Fox family's treatment of Adelaide and her mother Susan demonstrates how benevolence and cruelty could exist within the same household. Although none of her children endured physical punishment, Susan was whipped in June 1859 for disobedience. Adelaide, working inside the house, probably witnessed her mother's punishment. Slave children often tried to deflect lashes by running between the victim and the tormentor or by attacking the person meting out the reproof. In this case, Adelaide appears to have been an idle bystander. Susan's recalcitrance continued, and Tryphena threatened to complain to Dr. Fox. Without waiting for a second whipping, Susan ran away. Running away for brief periods after a punishment was not unusual) Susan, who was pregnant at the time, probably intended to return when calmer tempers prevailed. But when Dr. Fox found her after a week's absence, he immediately sent her to Woodburne, a cotton growing plantation owned by his father, James A. Fox, in Warren County, Mississippi This treatment appears unusually harsh for a first offense, but it may have been prompted by Susan's constant agitation of the mistress, who was also pregnant.

Adelaide, Margaret, and Buddy, who had already been permanently separated from any other family members, did not know if or when they would see their mother again, and the incident must have been frightening to them. The Foxes ignored any emotional distress the children suffered from Susan's banishment, however; Tryphena simply commented, "Adelaide is old enough to take care of herself & does a great many useful errands around the house."(n13) The historian Nell 1. Painter argues that slaves coped with abuses through family or community support and religious faith, but Adelaide, Margaret, and Buddy grew up in an isolated rural river community without access to education, religion, or familial sources of support. During their mother's five-month absence, Ann, a slave woman hired from her owner by Fox, attended to the children's physical needs. Perhaps she comforted them. Ironically, Susan's defiance may have been motivated partly by concern for her children. Mothers knew that slave children were more vulnerable to reproof than more experienced adult laborers, so Susan's behavior may have been intended to deflect attention from the children.(n14)

In addition to separation and physical abuse, sexual exploitation was also common in slave-owning households. As Molly Kinsey, who was ten years old when slavery ended, told a WPA interviewer, "I was so young I missed all the evil, but chile I knowed about it."(n15) Kinsey's observation confirms Harriet Jacobs's assertion that children became "prematurely knowing in evil things" before reaching 12 years of age.(n16) While Adelaide and Margaret were not sexually abused themselves, they must have been aware of their mother's experiences. Susan gave birth to several children after her purchase in 1858, and circumstantial evidence strongly suggests that Dr. Fox fathered Susan's mulatto son born in 1860. If true, it helps to explain why she and Tryphena Fox had such a stormy relationship.

In the second case under study, Harriet Jacobs became the property of the lames Norcom family through an estate dispersal. In 1825, North Carolinian Margaret Horniblow bequeathed the 12-year-old Jacobs to Mary Matilda Norcom, her three-year-old niece and daughter of lames and Mary Horniblow Norcom. The doctor also purchased Harriet's brother, John. The Norcoms owned scores of slaves housed on farms in the country, but the Jacobs children lived in Edenton, where Norcom practiced medicine.

The Norcoms made no special preparations when Harriet and her brother John came into the household. Dr. Norcom already owned their aunt, who also lived in his Edenton home. Harriet assumed responsibilities as a domestic servant that were appropriate for her age and, as she later recounted, "tried to merit . . . kindness by the faithful discharge" of her duties. She was partly responsible for the care of her three-year-old owner. Jacobs loved Mary, who returned her affection. When Mary's mother intimated that her affectionate response "proceeded from fear" it troubled Jacobs, though she was helpless against the spurious charge. Jacobs believed that Mrs. Norcom was jealous of Harriet's relationship with her daughter.(n17)

Because Harriet and John's mother had died, it was left to their grandmother Molly Horniblow, a freedwoman, and her children to help to meet Harriet and John's physical and emotional needs. Slaveowners commonly issued children one or two garments per year, often of poor quality, and sometimes children were forced to wear these clothes long after outgrowing them. Harriet's scanty wardrobe rankled her, primarily the linsey-woolsey dress provided by her mistress. She hated the garment not so much because it was uncomfortable but because it was a badge of slavery. Horniblow supplemented Harriet's clothing supply, which no doubt boosted her self-esteem. She also gave her granddaughter extra food from her bakery, a welcome addition since, as Harriet later recalled, in the Norcom household "little attention was paid to the slaves' meals."(n18) Unlike many slaves, Harriet was literate, having taught herself to read. She read the Bible, although she did not write of any particular religious convictions in her autobiography. Because of their literacy and their opportunities to interact with freedpersons and others outside the Norcom household, Harriet and John Jacobs had a more expansive world than the children owned by Dr. Fox, which encouraged their desire for freedom.

Once free herself, Molly Horniblow had purchased her eldest son, although she did not manumit him. This was not entirely unusual, as state law might have prevented him from remaining in the state. Free persons sometimes held family members for security reasons as well. In any case, her son lived as a virtually free man. Daniel Jacobs, Horniblow's son-in-law and the father of Harriet and John, remained the slave of Dr. Andrew Knox, who also lived in Edenton. John Jacobs attributed his abhorrence of slavery to their father, a man who chafed under bondage. "I could frequently perceive the pent-up agony of his soul," John remembered. "The knowledge that he was a slave himself, and that his children were also slaves, embittered his life." Harriet confirmed that her father "by his nature, as well as by the habit of transacting business . . . had more of the feelings of a freeman than [was] common among slaves."(n19) When prohibited from hiring his own time as a carpenter, thus ending the possibility of earning enough money to purchase his children, Daniel Jacobs "sank into a state of mental dejection."(n20)

Like Susan, Harriet Jacobs could not avert sexual exploitation. By the time she was 14, she wrote, "the war of my life had begun." Dr. Norcom attempted to seduce her with "unclean images such as only a vile monster could think of," but she resisted. Finally, believing it was "less degrading to give one's self than to submit to compulsion," the teenager began a liaison with an unmarried white man, Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, rather than submit to Norcom's sexual aggression. Jacobs anticipated that an enraged Norcom would sell her because she had favored another arid fantasized about the generous lover she hoped would buy and eventually free her. "With all these thoughts revolving in my mind and seeing no other way of escaping the doom I so much dreaded," wrote Jacobs, "I made a headlong plunge." She did not condemn Sawyer, but said, "I knew what I did, and I did it with deliberate calculation."(n21)

Harriet Jacobs made the decision out of a misguided sense of desperation. The 15-year-old was too immature to fathom the true nature of the power relationship she entered. Certainly, attention from the suave Sawyer, an attorney later elected to Congress, was flattering, but his intentions were no more honorable than those of James Norcom, and in any event, Norcom did not sell her. Sawyer fathered Harriet's two children, Joseph and Louise Matilda, who lived with Molly Horniblow. Norcom was furious when he first learned that Harriet was pregnant and threatened to beat her. "He did not fail," wrote Jacobs, "to remind me that my child was an addition to his stock of slaves." Norcom continued to try to seduce her after the birth of her child. When he learned that she was again pregnant, he "was exasperated beyond measure" and cut off all her hair. To add to Harriet's problems, Mary Norcom, erroneously suspecting an illicit relationship between her husband and Harriet, also badgered the girl. At age 22, Harriet ran away and remained in Horniblow's unheated and unventilated attic for seven years, hidden even from her children, before making her way north, where she became an abolitionist. Sawyer eventually purchased Harriet's children, and though he did not free them, they continued to live as quasi-free with their great-grandmother.(n22)

The third case history is that of Cornelai Smith, who, in contrast to the Jacobs children, enjoyed a relatively privileged upbringing. But the shadow of sexual abuse also hung over Cornelia, as her birth had resulted from Sidney Smith's rape of Harriet Smith, a slave owned by his sister Mary Ruffin Smith in the home of their father, Dr. James Smith. James Smith had given Harriet permission to marry Ruben Day, a free man, and she bore him a son, Julius. But within two years, James's sons Sidney and Francis began to abuse Harriet sexually, and it became impossible for Day to protect the integrity of his family. In fact, Day's last attempt to visit his wife and young son ended when the Smith brothers assaulted him with the "butt end of a carriage whip" and threatened to "shoot him on sight" if he ever returned. Following a life-threatening fight between Sidney and his brother Francis over her, Harriet settled into a long-term relationship with the victorious Francis, also a doctor, and bore him three children, Emma, Laura, and Annette.(n23)

The Smith brothers remained unmarried and continued to live in their father's home, though the enmity between them never subsided. Their sister Mary, who also never married, assumed maternal responsibility for Cornelia and the young children of Harriet and Francis Smith. The girls lived within the Smith home while their mother remained in the slave quarters across the yard with Julius. They were thus estranged from their real mother, and Mary Ruffin Smith and Harriet "shared a strange motherhood in which neither could fully express her maternal feelings." Under such circumstances, if the girls sang "Sometimes I feel like a Motherless Child," it was understandable. Cornelia had no difficulties with her mistress. She performed domestic chores and acted as her aunt's chief assistant in the smoke house, poultry yard, and dairy barn, which she seemed to relish. She probably also helped her aunt with her young siblings' care which, although there is no mention of it, would not have been unusual.(n24)

The Smith girls were baptized in the Chapel of the Cross on the campus of the University of North Carolina (where Cornelia's granddaughter, Pauli Murray, delivered her first sermon after ordination as an Episcopal priest), but proximity to the school otherwise made no significant difference in their lives. Cornelia Smith appears to have been only minimally literate, and her sisters probably received little, if any, schooling at the hands of their well-educated relatives. The Smiths' treatment of Harrie's daughters reveals their ambivalence toward them. On the whole, the Smith children were kindly treated; as Pauli Murray wrote, "The Smiths were as incapable of treating the little girls wholly as servants . . . as they were of recognizing them openly as kin." "At times," she continued, "the Smiths' involuntary gestures of kinship were so pronounced the children could not help thinking of themselves as Smith grandchildren. But at other times, their innocent overtures of affection were rebuffed without explanation and they were driven away with cruel epithets."(n25)

Although Francis Smith's children kept their distance and called him "Marse Frank," and he, in turn, "shrugged them off and treated them as part of the surroundings," Cornelia's relationship with her father was warm. Sidney Smith, an attorney and member of the North Carolina General Assembly in 1846, showed affection openly, "gloried in her," and made the child his confidant. Acting as his personal servant, Cornelia drew close to her father while seeking acceptance and clarification of her own identity. She gained a reputation for being high spirited, outspoken, and hard to manage. Indeed, it must have been difficult for Cornelia and her sisters to maneuver through the tension-filled household. Emma, Laura, and Annette must have been aware of the affection Sidney showed toward Cornelia, while their older sister appeared to ignore the protection her father afforded her against the harsher facets of slavery. Never reconciled to her status as a slave, Cornelia Smith explained repeatedly, "We were free. We were just born in slavery, that's all." Sidney Smith encouraged her to believe she was an octoroon and could marry either a white or black person.(n26)

Imogene and Adaline Johnson, the subjects of the fourth study, were also the offspring of a biracial union like the Smith children, but their mother appears to have been a willing participant in a long-standing relationship with Richard M. Johnson. Julia Chinn, unlike Harriet Smith, assumed a prominent place in her owner's household as the "chief manager of the domestic concerns," taking full charge of the household during Johnson's absence. On occasion, she was assisted by Thomas Henderson, a young white tutor at the Choctaw Academy on Johnson's plantation. In either case, Johnson was fully aware of the arrangements, and Chinn reported routine events to him in regular correspondence. According to family lore, Chinn became Johnson's mistress following his mother's objections to his intentions to marry outside their social class. Nevertheless, Johnson treated Chinn as his wife and did not deny paternity of her children.(n27)

There is no mention of the work assigned to Imogene or Adaline Johnson. An observer noted that "rather than to have turned [the girls] into a Negro quarter, or sent them to a cotton farm," Johnson treated them in a "kind and tender manner." In fact, he "unblushingly treated [them] as his daughters, placing them at the same table with the most honorable of his white guests." It was dearly understood by persons employed or owned by Johnson that the girls were not servants. If they performed chores, it was at the behest of their mother who, as mistress of the Johnson household, delegated all work assignments. Clearly, Imogene and Adaline were not subjected to the kind of arbitrary authority their enslaved contemporaries often endured.(n28)

Imogene and Adaline Johnson lived in their father's Kentucky home and enjoyed their parents' undivided attention. Johnson, a Baptist known as a humanitarian among his contemporaries, indulged his daughters and provided for their education. The tutor at the Choctaw Academy "soon discovered . . . uncommon aptness" in the two children. "I want you to persevere in learning my girls," Johnson wrote to Henderson in late 1825. "Make them get a lesson [on Sundays] when they do not go to meeting." Imogene and Adaline Johnson received instruction "until their education was equal or superior to most of the females in the country"(n29)

Richard Johnson, like Cornelia Smith's father, recognized his children and doted upon them. In fact, the Kentuckian violated the unspoken rules of polite southern society when he insisted upon having the girls accompany him to public events. To help secure their future and that of their progeny, Johnson deeded parcels of his Scott County, Kentucky estate to them. The White Sulphur tract went to Imogene and her husband, while Adaline and her spouse, Thomas W. Scott, received the Blue Spring farm. There is no indication that the girls were not fully accepted in white society, and both married white men. When Adaline died in 1839, her distraught father wrote, "She was a source of inexhaustible happiness and comfort to me.... She was a firm & great prop to my happiness here, but she is gone where sorrow & sighing can never disturb her peaceful & quiet blossom."(n30)

The circumstances surrounding the births of Archibald, Francis, and John Grimke, the fifth family to be studied, were initially much like those of the Johnson children. They were the sons of the mulatto slave woman Nancy Weston and Henry Grimke, a successful Charleston, South Carolina lawyer. After an unsuccessful bid for a seat on the state supreme court in the mid-1840s, the widowed Grimke retired to Cane Acre, a rice plantation near Charleston, where his biracial sons were born. Grimke planned to move his family to Charleston after the birth of Nancy's third child, but he died unexpectedly during the typhoid epidemic of 1852. The pregnant Weston was left with Archibald and Francis, who were three and two years of age respectively. A codicil to Grimke's will stipulated that his biracial family become the property of Grimke's adult son, Montague, an engineer for the Northeastern Railroad, later known as the Atlantic Coast line. Grimke could not free his family himself because an 1820 state statute prohibited emancipations within the state.(n31)

Following the estate sale, Montague allowed Nancy and her children to live "virtually free" in Charleston for several years. Although illiterate, Weston supported herself and built a house with her own earnings as a laundress. Her resources were slim, but with the help of free relatives, the impoverished family managed to eke out a respectable living. While Henry Grimke's untimely death precludes speculation about the possibilities of a relationship with his younger children, the boys maintained a close association with their deeply religious mother, who worked hard to provide for their education.(n32)

Any work Archibald and Francis did was in their own interest and under their mother's direction, but this arrangement changed in 1860 when Montague Grimke and his new bride decided that the 10-and 11-year-old boys should become their house servants. Having lived essentially free all their lives, Archibald and Francis strongly resented bond service in their half-brother's household. Although they bowed to their new mistress, they refused to greet her respectfully. Archibald worked slowly and inefficiently, often refusing instructions and feigning ignorance. Francis simply walked away from a job when so inclined. Their defiance was similar to that of other enslaved persons who registered discontent through day-to-day resistance. Because of his unsatisfactory behavior, Archibald was beaten not only by Montague but also in the public workhouse. In addition, he was confined to the stock with his hands attached to a pulley, his body stretched tightly while he was whipped. Far from being submissive, Archibald defiantly reminded his tormentor that the beating was all at the behest of his own half-brother. Before long, Montague sent Francis to the workhouse as well. Neither of the boys recanted or accepted the loss of their liberty.(n33)

Archibald ran away when he was 13. He remained for a time in the home of a free family before fleeing with his mother's assistance to the home of another free man, Thomas Cole, where he remained until the February 1865 fall of Charleston two years later. Francis Grimke also fled from bondage a few months after Archibald. For two years, he served as a valet in the Confederate Army before he was arrested and jailed for several months. Rather than take the youngster back into his home, Montague sold him to a Confederate officer. Francis's reenslavement was brief, though, as the Confederacy surrendered soon after.(n34)

Archibald and Francis Grimke eventually enrolled at Pennsylvania's Lincoln University where they came to the attention of their father's sisters, Sarah and Angelina. Sarah Grimke Weld declared that "her brother had wronged [the] children" and that "his sisters must right them." The two women, abolitionists and advocates of women's rights, established a cordial friendship with their nephews, who became prominent citizens. Archibald, an editor and author, later served as American consul to the Dominican Republic from 1894 until 1898. Francis Grimke, who became a Presbyterian minister, was just as successful in pursuing his own goals. Their early years of freedom and subsequent enslavement made a lasting impression upon the brothers, leaving them fiercely independent and determined to achieve their ambitions.(n35)

To return to Genovese's typology and the first of his comparative criteria, the day-to-day existence of the slave children in this study varied markedly. The Smith and Johnson offspring were treated well materially, far beyond the lot of most slaves. While the Fox family provided Adelaide with occasional gifts in addition to shelter and clothing, the Jacobs children received only parsimonious allotments of food and clothing that were barely adequate for their needs. As Tryphena Fox noted, supplying adequate clothing, food, and shelter was in the best interest of slaveholders, as healthy slaves were more productive, but providing more than basic necessities depended on the whim of the owner.

The living conditions and treatment of the children under study also varied widely. Adaline and Imogene Johnson were treated as the favored daughters of the house. They were well educated, inherited their father's property, and married out of slavery. Cornelia Smith was also favored by her father Sidney and her aunt. The experiences of Cornelia Smith and her sisters are similar to those of the Grimke children--at least during their early years--in that their owners were ambivalent about their status as persons or property, family or servants. The Smiths generally treated Harriet Smith's daughters well, though little or no effort was made to educate them. Archibald and Francis Grimke were allowed to live essentially free during their early years, but their education came about through their mother's efforts. Harriet and John Jacobs were self-taught. While Tryphena Fox sometimes treated Adelaide kindly, Adelaide and her siblings were never considered anything but household servants. Harriet and John do not appear to have had even that level of kindness, having instead an acrimonious relationship with their owners.

All of the children lived in a slave society where physical abuse and degradation were rife, whether or not they were personally subjected to physical punishment. The Grimke children probably experienced the most physical punishment of the children in this sample since, after being forcibly returned to Montague Grimke, they were whipped by the jailor as well as their brother. Even in the usually benevolent Johnson household, when Julia Chinn reported to Johnson that most of the adult slave men were absent from the plantation one Sunday in December 1825, he called upon the tutor to "chastise them on their naked skins." Although Chinn, a slave herself, did not dispense the punishment, she was very much a part of its execution.(n36)

Most of the children in this study were also exposed to sexual abuse in one form or another. Harriet Jacobs posited that "a sad epoch in the life of a slave girl" began when she reached her teens.(n37) Harriet experienced sexual harassment and exploitation at the hands of her owner and Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, who fathered her children, and dwelt emphatically on this aspect of her life in slavery in her autobiography. Dr. Fox may have fathered his slave Susan's mulatto son. What young Adelaide, Margaret, and their brother thought of the "fine mulatto boy" remains unknown, but the birth of a child whose physical features differed greatly from their own would not have gone unnoticed, either by the children or Tryphena Fox. As the southern diarist Mary Chesnut commented:

Like the patriarchs of old our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines, and the mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children--and every lady tells you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody's household, but those in her own she seems to think drop from the clouds, or pretends so to think.(n38)

While the Smith girls did not personally experience sexual abuse, as an adult, Cornelia Smith's "face saddened and she shook her head sorrowfully" when remembering her own mother, Harriet. "Sometimes she would break off in the middle of her tale and sigh as if to say what that poor woman went through was too painful to put into words," Cornelia's granddaughter Murray wrote. Cornelia said that Harriet sometimes rocked back and forth, "her eyes fixed on the red embers, as if she were caught in some strange ritual of memory." Cornelia knew that her mother held a "silent smoldering hatred against [Sidney and Francis Smith] to the end of her days."(n39)

Not all interactions between enslaved women and white men were oppressive, as shown by the companionship shared by Julia Chinn and Richard M. Johnson, and by Nancy Weston and Henry Grimke. However, the experiences of Harriet Jacobs and Harriet Smith were more common and are consistent with the exploitive relationships recounted by WPA informants.

Each household differed, yet few of the children were free from encroachments upon their social development and family security. The complexities of slavery caused the lives of parents, children, and owners to intersect at so many points that the actions of one inevitably reverberated upon the others. Harriet and John Jacobs, having already lost their mother, were abruptly removed from their childhood home when the Norcom family acquired them. Susan's children had been separated from their father and any extended family before they were purchased by David Fox. Although they were not directly in the "crossfire" between Susan and Tryphena Fox, Adelaide, Margaret, and Buddy could not escape the tensions created when their mother and owner quarreled, and faced the continual threat of separation from their mother as a result of the ongoing acrimony between them. In all probability, Adelaide's subdued behavior resulted from seeing the repercussions of such disputes.

We will never know the extent to which Imogene and Adaline Johnson concerned themselves with the social construction of race or its impact upon how they viewed themselves and others around them. According to the tutor Thomas Henderson, "A stranger would not suspect [Imogene and Adaline] to be what they really are--the children of a colored woman."(n40) The contrast between Richard Johnson's and Sidney Smith's affection for their daughters and Francis Smith's indifference toward his is striking. Yet, as Archibald and Francis Grimke discovered, even an indulgent father provided at best a tenuous security for the children of a slave woman.

Further examples of slavery's complexities are evident in the lives of the majority of the children described in this paper. Among the more poignant ones is the apparent lack of a relationship in the Smith household between Julius and his father Ruben Day, who had talked of buying his son before being forcibly cut off from him. Julius had little interaction with his half-sisters, who lived in their owners' home while he lived with his mother in the slave quarters, and even Harriet Smith had little time for the boy because of her work. In addition, she was forced to maintain a relationship "barren of all communication save that of the flesh" with Francis Smith, one of the men who had driven away Julius's father. Further, at 13 years of age, Julius was lost in the woods during a snowstorm and was not discovered until exposure to the severe temperature had caused permanent physical disabilities.(n41)

Regardless of their conditions and however well they were treated, slave children were shackled to a system in which they were defined according to their color and their mothers' regal status. Material well-being paled when compared to other facets of treatment. "The feeding and clothing me well," wrote Frederick Douglass as he remembered his childhood in bondage, "could not atone for taking my liberty from me."(n42) As chattel or "quasi-slaves," children observed or experienced corporal punishment, separation of family, or sexual exploitation.

To help their children cope with the vagaries of slave life, slave parents, whether together or alone, assumed the major responsibility for teaching their offspring the behavior appropriate for a child and a slave, and how to defer to whites while maintaining self-respect. The basic goal was to shield slave children from harm at the hands of hostile whites. Archibald Grimke once commented that blacks "learned early to pass much of their lives in an underworld . . . far removed from the white man's eyes and ears."(n43)

Enslaved parents insisted upon family allegiance and expected children to respond without hesitation. Harriet and John Jacobs' father, Daniel, impressed that lesson upon his son when he scolded: "You are my child and when I call you, you should come immediately, if you have to pass through fire and water."(n44) John had responded to his owner rather than to his father, and Harriet Jacobs attested to the confusion caused by simultaneous calls from her father and the doctor's wife. Daily experience taught slave children how to maneuver through the slave society, avoiding repercussions from both parents and owners as much as possible.

Still, the only way to escape from exploitation and abuse was to obtain freedom. There are no extant accounts of the Fox slaves' desire for freedom, but absence of documentation does not mean that the rebellious Susan did not kindle dreams of liberty in her children. Adelaide's fascination with trinkets such as Tryphena's beads was only a young child's response to an act of kindness. It says nothing about her hopes and dreams beyond the basic necessities, nor does it reveal her emotions when her mother was beaten and ran away.

Both Harriet and John Jacobs emphatically recorded their determination to escape slavery. When her distraught brother lamented, "We shall never be free," Harriet rejected the notion vehemently. "We were growing older and stronger," she remembered. "Perhaps we might, before long, be allowed to hire our own time, and then we could earn money to buy our freedom. William [pseudonym for John S. Jacobs] declared this was much easier to say than to do; moreover, he did not intend to buy his freedom. We held daily controversies upon this subject." Further, when Molly Horniblow's youngest son planned to run away, he discussed his plans with Harriet.(n45)

Gender was a factor m whether slaves purchased freedom or ran away. Slave mothers were less likely to run away than childless persons due to the extra hazards of taking children along and their unwillingness to leave them behind. Women also had fewer opportunities for skilled work or to hire their own time for extra money to purchase freedom than did men. But even Harriet and John Jacobs's father, who had wanted to buy his children's freedom, was never able to do so. Knowledge of this thwarted goal made a profound impression upon the children, who knew their father's ardent wish to liberate them, and their yearning for freedom did not subside. Harriet never accepted bondage as a permanent state for herself or her children.(n46)

Like the Jacobs children, Archibald and Francis Grimke lived in an urban setting, interacted with free persons in Charleston, and had aspirations for their own freedom. Nancy Weston believed that Henry Grimke had made provisions for her protection and care following his death. In willing Nancy and her children to Montague, Henry Grimke expected him to treat the Westons as family, instead, the young engineer viewed them as property. Although Montague allowed them to live as free for several years, supporting themselves, he had no compunction about reclaiming Archibald and Francis when they were old enough to be of use to him. The Grimke boys had thought they would be freed and believed that Montague had betrayed their father's confidence, which only strengthened their determination to escape slavery.

Neither the Jacobses nor the Grimkes were content to wait for someone else to free them. Both Harriet and John Jacobs ran away to the North, gained freedom, and worked for the abolition of slavery. The Grimke brothers also fled from slavery and went on to become prominent American citizens.

Although the Fox slaves were more passive, their opportunity for freedom came with the Civil War. Hygiene was a small and isolated household in rural Louisanna along the Mississippi River south of New Orleans, so Dr. Fox in 1862 moved his household to a place of greater safety at Woodburne, a few miles from Vicksburg, Mississippi. Eleven-year-old Adelaide must have wondered about her family's hurried move and the contrast in Tryphena Fox's hospitality for Confederate soldiers and hostility for Union troops. When the other slaves owned by Dr. Fox ran to Union lines, Adelaide, her siblings, and her mother remained behind until July 1864. Then, rather than returning to Louisiana, they went north to Memphis. They probably saw the war as a great liberating factor in their lives, particularly Susan. Adelaide and her siblings were no longer subject to arbitrary authority and abuses, and opportunities for independent social and cultural development were not as remote as before.

On the obverse side, the Civil War shattered the world with which the 1 7-year-old Cornelia Smith identified. Unlike many slaves who welcomed the Union soldiers as emancipators, Cornelia avoided them while helping her aunt bury the family's valuables. She remained loyal to Mary Ruffin Smith and stayed with her for several years before marrying the free-born Robert Fitzgerald. As for the Johnson daughters, there is no evidence to suggest that Imogene and Adaline saw themselves as enslaved or persons of color; they did not appear to be concerned with their peculiar circumstances. They married white men and lived among whites.

The remnants of slavery disappeared slowly. It would require much time for exslave children, whether owned by planters or professionals, to divest themselves entirely of slavery's cruel legacy. As they matured and became parents of free boys and girls, they were now solely responsible for the care and treatment of their children, and even basic necessities were sometimes difficult to obtain. Most former slaves, even those favored like Cornelia Smith, had received only minimal education at best. The Johnson daughters were a rare exception. But, as Harriet and John Jacobs and the Grimkes found, while there were new difficulties, there were also new opportunities, educational and otherwise, for the former slaves as they and their children carved out places for themselves as American citizens.

(n1) Tryphena Blanche Holder Fox to Anna Rose Holder, 14 October 1860, Mississippi Department of Archives and History [hereafter MDAH], Jackson, Mississippi [emphasis in original].

(n2) Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (1861; ed. and reprinted, Cambridge, 1987), 19.

(n3) Willie Lee Rose, Slavery and Freedom, ed. William W. Freehling, expanded ed. (New York, 1982), 39.

(n4) Steven Mintz, ed., African-American Voices: The Life Cycle of Slavery, part 5 (St. James, N.Y., 1993); Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomington, 1995).

(n5) Eugene D. Genovese, "The Treatment of Slaves in Different Countries: Problems in the Applications of the Comparative Method," in Eugene D. Genovese, In Red and Black Marxian Explorations in Southern and Afro-American History (New York, 1971), 159.

(n6) John S. Jacobs, "True Tale of Slavery," The Leisure Hour: A Family Journal of Instruction and Recreation, 7 February 1861, 86.

(n7) Pauli Murray, Proud Shoes: The Story Of an American Family (New York, 1984).

(n8) Leland Winfield Meyer, The Life and Times of Colonel Richard M Johnson of Kentucky (New York, 1932).

(n9) Dickson D. Bruce, Jr., Archibald Grimke: Portrait Of a Black Independent (Baton Rouge, 1993).

(n10) George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, 19 Vols. (Westport, Conn., 1972).

(n11) Tryphena Blanche Holder Fox to Anna Rose Holder, 27 November 18;7 and 15 November 1858. MDAH [emphasis in original].

(n12) Deborah Gray White, Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York, 1985), 69.

(n13) Tryphena Blanche Holder Fox to Anna Rose Holder, 13 June 1859 and 15 November 1858, MDAH.

(n14) Nell Irving Painter, "Soul Murder and Slavery: Toward a Fully Loaded Cost Accounting," in U.S. History as Women's History: New Feminist Essay, ed. Linda Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar (Chapel Hill, 1995).

(n15) George P. Rawick, ed., "Georgia Narratives," in vol. 4, part 2, The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, 372.

(n16) Jacobs, Incidents, 28.

(n17) Ibid., 20.

(n18) Ibid., 10.

(n19) John S. Jacobs, "True Tale of Slavery," 86; Jacobs, Incidents, 9..

(n20) John S. Jacobs, "True Tale of Slavery," 86.

(n21) Jacobs, Incidents, 19, 27, 55.

(n22) Ibid., 59, 61

(n23) Murray, Proud Shoes, 42.

(n24) Ibid., 48.

(n25) Ibid., 49.

(n26) Ibid., 49-50.

(n27) Meyer, The Life and Times of Colonel Richard M. Johnson, 318.

(n28) Ibid., 317, 320-21.

(n29) Ibid., 318, 319.

(n30) Ibid., 317, 321, 322.

(n31) Bruce, Archibald Grimke, 2-6.

(n32) Ibid., 6-7.

(n33) Ibid., 12-13.

(n34) Ibid., 14-15, 16, 67-74, 257.

(n35) Ibid., 23, 64, 68.

(n36) Meyer, Life and Times, 319.

(n37) Jacobs, Incidents, 28.

(n38) C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut's Civil War (New Haven, 1981), 29.

(n39) Murray, Proud Shoes, 35, 44.

(n40) Quoted in Meyer, Life and Times, 318.

(n41) Murray, Proud Shoes, 40, 47, 48.

(n42) Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York, 1969), 161

(n43) Bruce, Archibald Grimke, 10.

(n44) Jacobs, Incidents, 9.

(n45) Ibid., 10 [emphasis in original].

(n46) Ibid., 5.