“Her Country’s Children”: Black Childhood, Religion, and Slavery

Abstract

“Her Country’s Children”: Black Childhood, Religion, and Slavery excavates previously underexplored archival materials to document the religious history of Black childhood from the early national period through the Civil War era. Drawing on institutional records, correspondence, diaries, oral histories, folkloric studies, newspapers, and photographs, this dissertation argues that slavery profoundly shaped the intersection of Black childhood and religion in early and antebellum America. Through an analysis of four case studies that span Pennsylvania and South Carolina, “Her Country’s Children” demonstrates that ideas of Black childhood and real Black children’s relationships with religious practices, discourses, institutions, and communities across this period were marked by the violence, logic, and repercussions of slavery. Focused on the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Part I highlights how Black and white ministers, educators, and abolitionists interpreted the spiritual exhibitions, academic performances, and labor of Black children as central actions for the end of slavery and the uplift of the African American race. Reformers of various denominational stripes created schools and orphanages specifically for Black children, which aimed to develop Black children into hard-working, morally fit Protestant adults. Part II turns to South Carolina, primarily the Lowcountry and Sea Islands regions, and argues that many enslaved and formerly enslaved Black religious communities conceived of Black childhood as a stage of spiritual refinement and as a period of heightened proximity to the nonhuman spirit realm. Enslaved and formerly enslaved elders, particularly elderly Black women, developed rituals that worked to protect children from spiritual and physical dangers, provided children with a spirit world education, and interpreted children’s physical markings and birth circumstances as religious knowledge and prescience that could be harnessed for the benefit of their communities. Across the four chapters, the dissertation reveals the critical roles that African American women have historically played in shaping the religious experiences of Black children. They have operated as caretakers, teachers, spirit world guides, and spiritual parents and often met the ire of both Black and white cultural commentators. Altogether, the analysis conducted in this project makes an interdisciplinary contribution by underscoring the significance of Black girls and boys—as symbolic figures and historical actors—to early and antebellum African American religious history.