archives@tulane.edu / "Bittersweet Childhoods" explores the experiences of enslaved children in nineteenth-century Louisiana and Martinique. Children played a fundamental role in helping their people survive material deprivation, build social networks, and maintain a cultural sense of self. Their labor as slaves on sugar plantations was gradual but central to the functioning of the capitalist ventures that sugar plantations were. I contextualize the lives of enslaved children within changing and competing ideas about childhood in the Atlantic world. Enlightenment notions of children as innocent, malleable beings in need of protection were increasingly normalized in the nineteenth-century, and although enslaved children were not shielded from the violence and deprivation of bondage, their lives were influenced by these changing social and cultural values. During childhood, slaves’ relationships to the planter class were bittersweet, as cultural expectations regarding childhood allowed more leniency, without ever completely sheltering them from the horrors of bondage. In reaction to the labor they owed free and enslaved adults and the hardships they experienced, slave youths rebelled against adults in their own communities, destroyed and stole their owners’ property, ran away, participated in slave rebellions, and voiced their political opinions. Like planters, authorities held different expectations for young slaves and were therefore more lenient when dealing with their rebellious behaviors. While youths were never commodities of choice for planters and their worth declined in the last decades of slavery, they represented a substantial share of the transatlantic, domestic, and local trades that fueled Martinique and Louisiana’s slave markets. Nevertheless, the two regions’ legal protection of children from family separation meant young slaves were less affected by family separation than enslaved children throughout the Americas. Finally, in both societies, children were deeply involved in the processes of emancipation, as the French and U.S. governments sought to alleviate their workload and give them an education to prepare them for freedom and citizenship. Slave children’s involvement in their regions’ processes of emancipation highlights how Martinique’s colonial setting led to prolonged government interference affected slave children differently than in Louisiana, where planters’ rights were paramount until the federal occupation during the Civil War. / 1 / Alix Riviere
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TULANE/oai:http://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/:tulane_94771 |
| Date | January 2019 |
| Contributors | Riviere, Alix (author), (author), Clark, Emily (Thesis advisor), (Thesis advisor), School of Liberal Arts History (Degree granting institution), NULL (Degree granting institution) |
| Publisher | Tulane University |
| Source Sets | Tulane University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | electronic, pages: 271 |
| Rights | No embargo, Copyright is in accordance with U.S. Copyright law. |
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