| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Marie Jenkins Schwartz. Born in Bondage: Growing Up Enslaved in the Antebellum South. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2000. Pp. ix, 272. $35.00.

Previous studies of slave childhood have tended either to emphasize the horrors experienced by young African Americans or to present childhood as a period in life when slaves were shielded from the worst aspects of bondage. Sensitive to the complexities of her topic, Marie Jenkins Schwartz's beautifully written book chronicles both the miseries and triumphs of the slave childhood experience. In the opening pages of her work, Schwartz effectively establishes that slave children played a crucial demographic and economic role in the southern plantation system. Yet Schwartz's claims about the significance of slave childhood flow less from statistical evidence than from her understanding of the ideological struggles between African Americans and white southern slaveowners. Building on the voluminous scholarship presenting "paternalism" as the dominant theme running through antebellum plantation culture, Schwartz hinges her historical narrative on the heretofore largely unexplored nexus of slave children and white claims about benevolent mastery. She brilliantly explores how white and black conflict over the upbringing of African-American children reveals the historical force of white slaveholder paternalism and also illuminates the slaves' ability to negotiate with and to resist their masters' ideology. . . .

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