During preparation for the Historic Children’s Voices project, AAS staff and advisors examined and discussed the lack of diversity among the children represented. The remarks below come out of discussion with the curators in the areas where children’s voices were selected for the project: manuscripts and amateur printed juvenilia.
Manuscripts
Ashley Cataldo, Curator of Manuscripts, AAS
Most of the manuscript material (handwritten newspapers, diaries, and poems) included in the project was created by white children in the Northeast. Why aren’t there more Black and Indigenous children’s voices in this material?
By design since 1819, the Society’s manuscripts department has collected primarily New England material. This geographic focus excludes many areas, such as Philadelphia, where there was a vibrant Black middle class with families that supported writing by their children. Additionally, the Society has only recently (within the last 20 years) begun consciously and intentionally to collect manuscript material created by children, including Black and Indigenous children, that were not already part of larger family collections. Finally, for many years before the 1970s the Society did not build relationships with Black and Indigenous community members. Such relationships might have encouraged them to place family papers at AAS for long-term preservation.
In New England, where the Society’s manuscripts collection is rooted, life for Black and Indigenous children was often difficult. Even though slavery officially ended in Massachusetts and New Hampshire in 1783 and in Connecticut and Rhode Island in 1784, gradual emancipation was embedded in eliminating slavery in southern New England. Indigenous children often grew up in communities where non-alphabetic literacy (quillwork, beading, weaving, and oral transmission) was dominant. The many Indigenous children who did learn English literacy were sent to charity schools where white missionaries determined the substance of what was included in the written record.
From the work of scholars in the field, we know that locating the extant voices of Black and Indigenous children in the handwritten record of the pre-Civil War northeast presents challenges. As Crystal Webster writes in Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood, “[Black] children…operated between and around historical, conceptual, geographic, and racialized boundaries of childhood and are therefore assumed to have disappeared from the historical record.” However, many institutions, such as schools, asylums, orphanages, and reformatories, educated Black children and taught them to write. Certainly many Black writers who rose to prominence before and after the Civil War certainly did not start writing as adults. Similarly, in English Letters and Indian Literacies, Hilary Wyss writes, “The story of Native education in English literacy is primarily available to scholars through print culture—a record overwhelmingly controlled and dominated by colonial figures” in charity and boarding schools. Regardless of the “religiously oriented set of practices offered to Native communities,” Wyss emphasizes, many men and women (and presumably children) wrote letters and other manuscripts. In other words, many Black and Indigenous children wrote in school or at home, but their writing was frequently directed by their instructors, and any record of their writing personal diaries or creating manuscript newspapers is scant.
Material created by Black and Indigenous children does exist in libraries and archives. In her book, Webster features eighteenth-century writings by thirteen-year-old Philadelphian Cyrus Bustill and children’s penmanship exercises from the Pennsylvania Abolition Society school. The Library Company of Philadelphia owns albums kept by middle-class Black girls Amy Matilda Cassey and Martina Dickerson from Philadelphia. AAS holds an album of botanicals and other materials kept by Martha Ann Lewey Brown, with some illustrations by her granddaughter, Martha Janet Brown, a young Black resident of Worcester, Massachusetts. This album is in the Brown family papers. Wyss cites the papers of teenagers Joseph Johnston (Mohegan) and the letters of Catharine Brown (Cherokee). We highly encourage those who use this website to look further at manuscripts written by Black and Indigenous children held by AAS and by other institutions. Links to some of these materials may be found on our resources page.
While AAS holds no diaries or manuscript newspapers created by Black or Indigenous children—due both to the Society’s centuries-old collecting practices and the historical conditions that make this material scarce—we hope that more material created by Black and Indigenous children will come to light. We hope that more voices will be heard, studied, and included in the historical record.
Printed Works
Laura Wasowicz, Curator of Children’s Literature, AAS
The voices of large segments of American children and youth are also missing in printed works by children due to their economic or social status. The reasons for this lie at a confluence of poverty, sexism, and access to education in the late-nineteenth-century United States.
Free public primary school education for American children was not made compulsory by law nationwide until 1918, beyond the chronological scope of the printed voices made accessible via the Historic Children's Voices project. Several professionally published examples of juvenilia in the project are collections of pieces written as school projects. Young students who had their pieces published possessed proficiency in written expressive language, beyond knowing the alphabet and being able to write their names. Many lived in two-parent households in which the parents’ income allowed their children to stay in school, as opposed to needing to work to help support the family. For an example, see Apples of Gold in Pictures of Silver (1854), an anthology of essays, poems and stories written by New York and Brooklyn public school students. Children who were not in school could not participate in such publications.
Amateur books printed by children and youth on table-top presses required the ability to read a manuscript likely written in cursive script, set type from that manuscript on a composing stick in which the letters were ordered backwards, and then read the printed sheets to check for errors.
Amateur writing, printing, and publishing thus required proficiency in literacy skills, all of which would be out of reach for children without solid education in reading and writing.
Additionally, poor children had to help support their families financially by working for a wage. According to the 1870 United States census, one out of eight children under age 16 were working; by 1900, that figure increased to one out of five children.i Many children and youth were not only excluded from access to education because they were working twelve to fourteen hours a day, six days a week, but this workload also precluded the leisure time to read, write, or print stories by or for their peers.
Amateur printing during the golden years of amateurdom (ca. 1868-1899) required expensive equipment. One amateur book available on this website is Under the Black Flag (1874), printed by Edward Mino Hardy, seventeen-year-old from Whiteland, Indiana, who was also the local representative for the Novelty Job Printing Press Company. Hardy advertised table-top presses ranging from $17 (today $419) for a duodecimo press with a 4 ½ x 6 ½-inch press bed to $30 (today $740) for an octavo press with a 6 x 10-inch press bed to $50 (today $1,233) for a quarto press with a 10 x 14-inch press bed. Even a used duodecimo press would sell for $12 (today $300). Given these prices, amateur presses were largely only within the reach of middle-class and wealthy youth.
Contemporary prescriptions of gender roles also limited access to amateur printing. Although there were female amateurs at this time, most took the role of writers who sent manuscripts to male amateur printers who had access to presses, imitating the male-dominated profession of printing.
i Source: History of child labor in the United States—part 1: little children working