Colonial America

by Richard Middleton, Anne Lombard

  2 Children

  Historians have sometimes suggested that in western Europe before the eighteenth century, childhood did not exist. Children were treated as little adults, expected to bear adult responsibilities at ages when we think of them as unformed innocents who need special nurturing from adults and time to develop.9 Obviously, the assertion that childhood was nonexistent cannot be literally correct, since childhood dependence is universal. Every society has to find ways to care for and train young children if they are to survive. But certainly the experience of childhood was different in British colonial societies than in our own. Children were expected to work at a young age, and could be thrust into positions of great responsibility long before we would consider them to be ready for adulthood.

  Most evidence suggests that British colonial parents wanted children very much, and welcomed them into their families with joy. Mothers nursed their infants, and paid close attention to certain aspects of infant and toddler care.10 Still, some colonial childrearing practices would seem (to us) surprising, suggesting that the goals of early childhood care were somewhat different from our own.

  One of the most striking patterns in infant and toddler care was an apparent concern with making sure that babies grew straight, stood, and began walking as quickly as possible. Infant clothing, for example, seems to have been designed with these goals in mind. Babies were tightly swaddled for about the first three months, wrapped in linen bands that effectively prevented them from moving. Once they were out of swaddling clothes, babies were often put into corsets worn under the clothes, which held their bodies upright and straight. Babies of seven or eight months were discouraged from crawling. Instead various devices were used to speed the transition to standing and walking, the most popular being standing stools, go-carts, and leading strings. Parents' evident concern with straightness, as well as the seeming haste with which children were urged to stand and walk, are puzzles that need to be explained. Some historians speculate that the concern stemmed from the premise that children were essentially bestial and uncivilized and would fail to develop properly unless they were consciously molded. Others posit the more practical explanation that such practices helped mothers care safely for their children while simultaneously performing their household work. Infants who are swaddled typically stay calm and still, which would have been helpful for mothers who had to work constantly in gardens and kitchens. Toddlers who are kept in standing stools are easily kept out of trouble, and small children who can move about independently can entertain themselves. So efficiency of effort was probably a major goal of early childrearing practices.11

  In most settler families, once children learned to walk until about age six they were left mainly to their own devices, although under the watchful eye of an older child or servant. During these years boys and girls were dressed in identical long garments, these being the easiest to wash and pass on from one child to the next. Few children could expect new clothes. Toys were rare; most children played imaginatively with whatever was lying around the house. Older children played games with their siblings, either indoors or outdoors as weather permitted. Early education from adults was generally minimal – parents were too busy running the farm or managing the household to spend much time with young children.

  This pattern of childrearing meant that women mothered extensively rather than intensively. This contrasts with the present day, when most women rear children for just one period of their lives and devote as much time as possible to their upbringing. It may be that upper-class mothers had more time for their children, since they could employ servants and slaves to do their housework. But working-class women and farmer's wives had no option but to continue with their daily chores.12

  Some historians, especially in the past, have argued that parents in the colonial era withheld their affection from young children. Childrearing advice published before about 1740 suggests that emotional detachment was to some extent the ideal. Orthodox opinion held that too much affection was undesirable, since it made adults self-indulgent and children selfish. Hence the advice was to ignore the cries of infants, who were assumed to be either exercising their lungs or expressing their frustration at not being gratified in some excessive want. Notwithstanding the advice, there is considerable evidence that parents became emotionally attached to their children, became extremely anxious when children were ill or had accidents, and grieved deeply when they died. But our ideal of parents paying close attention to small children in order to nurture their verbal and emotional development would not have been a familiar one to most seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colonists. Very small children were not the center of their parents' attention.

  Around the age of six decisive changes occurred. Boys were given breeches, while girls remained in skirts. The change in clothing marked an important step on the road to adulthood. Both sexes began to be given small tasks, the girls helping their mothers and older sisters in the kitchen or dairy, the boys doing light farm work with their fathers. In New England and the middle colonies most children would also receive some schooling for a few hours each morning.

  At this point both girls and boys began to receive sustained attention from the parent of their own gender, since now they could be trained for the work they would do as adults. Girls spent increasing amounts of time with their mothers, learning the skills of household production. Since most boys would become farmers, they now began to spend time with their fathers, learning when and how to sow and harvest the crops. A small proportion of boys from the richer families progressed to a grammar school and even college in preparation for a career as a minister, lawyer, or merchant. Also, as colonial society developed, some boys around the age of 10 began an apprenticeship, normally lasting about nine years, during which the apprentice lodged with the master. That boys received so much attention was not accidental. In this patriarchal society, it was assumed that they were more capable of being educated than girls. Putting boys into a relationship with a responsible adult male mentor was seen as critical to getting them to abandon childish ways and become responsible adults, capable of heading their own families. The theory behind out-placement was to provide children with an education and skills – and to ensure that they remained under the tutelage and supervision of a responsible adult who could teach them the skills they would need to be productive adults. Again in theory, the relationship between master and servant was supposed to be similar to that between parent and child – stern but affectionate.

  The practice of out-placement could be quite different from the theory, especially for the children of the poor. Fatherless children and orphans as young as five were sometimes “put out” to live with families of strangers. The receiving master was supposed to provide a certain level of care and education in return for the child's labor, but in fact that education was rarely one that would enable boys to become independent householders later on, or girls to marry well. Servitude for poor children, historians have found, was more like welfare than education; it provided a way to relieve communities of the cost of their support. This had been true in early seventeenth-century England as well. There, poor children in their early teens were routinely kidnapped and transported to Virginia or Barbados, where they served without contracts until they reached adulthood (if they survived). With no adults capable of advocating for them, such children could be treated with appalling cruelty.13

  Although adults focused most of their energies on training older children, there were some regional and religious exceptions. Dissenting Protestants paid a great deal of attention to childhood as a stage of moral development, and believed that parents had to devote more than an ordinary amount of attention to their children's spiritual well-being to ensure their salvation. Puritans arrived at this conclusion in one way, Quakers in another, but the end result was similar – both Puritan and Quaker parents were more intensely involved in their children's spiritual educations than their nondissenting counterparts.

  Because the Puritans did the m
ost writing about childhood, their views are the best known. They believed (in common with most Englishmen of their time) that children were the product of original sin. But unlike most Englishmen, they also believed that salvation was available only to the elect, who could not sit idly by waiting for God's grace. Parents therefore had to carefully prepare their children for salvation. From as young an age as possible, children had to be carefully and systematically taught to suppress their impulses so they could avoid the temptations of Satan and learn to understand God's will. Historians frequently cite the Puritans' admonition that children's “natural pride” be “broken and beaten down” in early childhood, and the Puritans (like virtually all Englishmen) advocated the use of moderate corporal punishment. Its purpose, though, was not to destroy their children's self-esteem, but to teach them self-control. Puritan parents were also to warn children of the need to prepare their souls for death: a meaningful message, since children in the colonial world usually had at least one sibling who died before attaining their majority. And finally, parents needed to teach their children how to read, usually starting around age four or five, so that they could understand the Scriptures.

  Strikingly, from our point of view, the Puritans believed much of this parental involvement should come from the father, who as the head of a godly household had a special responsibility to attend to his children's spiritual development. Cotton Mather, the famous Massachusetts minister, worked as hard as anyone to live up to the Puritans' paternal ideal, taking it as his calling to “consider how to enrich [children's] minds with valuable knowledge; how to instill into their minds generous, gracious, and heavenly principles; how to restrain and rescue them from the paths of the destroyed, and fortify them against their peculiar temptations.” Certainly the task could not be left to the young persons themselves for “'tis folly for them to pretend unto any Wit and Will of their own.” In pursuit of his own advice, Mather questioned his six children every night, asking them what they had done during the day, whether they had “sought the Face of God and read His Word.” At meal times Mather sought to make the conversation “facetious as well as instructive.” For Mather, parenting was an important part of his role as an adult man.14

  Quaker ideas about childrearing are usually contrasted with those of the Puritans, since the Quakers were considerably more optimistic about children's natural capacity for virtue. They believed that children, like the rest of humanity, were innately good. According to Quakers, each soul was born with an inner light that could lead the individual to salvation. They recoiled from the coercive childrearing techniques of the Puritans and other contemporaries, opposing coercion of any kind as contrary to God's will. But Quakers were similar to Puritans in their belief that parents should be intensely involved in their children's moral education. The purpose of such involvement was not to tame children's corrupt natures but to prevent their children's inner light from being corrupted by the example of the outside world. Parents had to teach their children to achieve the behavioral ideals of kindness, gentleness, and truthfulness by providing them with proper examples, supported occasionally by verbal admonition and constant, patient love. Another difference from the Puritans was the Quakers' expectation that the parent responsible for providing these early examples would usually be the mother.15

  During the eighteenth century, Enlightenment era British writers began to join the chorus of voices calling for closer parental involvement in young children's moral and intellectual training. The first and most influential such writer was John Locke, who argued in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) and Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) that children were born as moral blank slates and must be taught through example and environment to control their passions and develop their rational capacities. Though Locke's emphasis on the use of moral suasion and affection differed from the Puritans' belief in coercion, Locke's emphasis on early childhood education was similar to that of the Reformed Protestants in their focus on understanding children as individuals and on beginning to shape their moral development at an early age. Other Enlightenment writers like Francis Hutcheson, too, suggested that children had an innate moral sense, which would flourish if it was nurtured by parents in infancy and early childhood. These ideas became increasingly popular among colonists as books from British presses became available in colonial cities during the eighteenth century, and wealthier colonists appear to have devoted increasing amounts of time to their children during early childhood compared to the past.16 At the same time, emerging new ideas about children probably heightened perceptions of children's helplessness and dependence.

  Even as new questions were being raised about children's moral development early in life, so too were questions being asked about the age at which children stopped needing adult tutelage and became responsible for making their own decisions. Although scholars used to assume that young people in colonial (and British) society always reached the “age of majority” at 21, it now appears that neither British nor colonial societies had a consistent age of majority before the late eighteenth century. Before the 1750s, children could be treated as legally capable adults at surprisingly young ages. Propertied boys could serve in the House of Commons as well as the Virginia House of Burgesses during their teens. Poor children were routinely sent out to service as toddlers, and could be hanged for felonies at age eight. Girls could legally “consent” to sexual intercourse with an adult male (thus providing him with a defense to a charge of rape) as young as eight or nine.

  By the mid to late eighteenth century, however, these seemingly anomalous legal rules were clearly changing. Children were by now usually excluded from voting or serving in political offices, and their treatment as morally responsible individuals was being postponed until they reached an age that we would consider more developmentally appropriate. This increase in the age of majority went hand in hand with the gradual reconceptualization of childhood as a malleable, unformed period in which capacities for reasoned decision-making had yet to be developed. As historian Holly Brewer has argued, these changes were connected with the gradual rethinking of the basis for religious and political communities that took place from the Reformation through the Enlightenment. Membership in communities was coming to be based less on inherited status, and more upon the capacity for carefully reasoned moral decision-making and consent. The new attention being paid to the need to nurture moral reasoning skills during childhood and adolescence coincided with the new concern among religious and political philosophers with the capacity for reason. Instead of thrusting children as quickly as possible into adult responsibilities, the new thinking was that children should wait until they were morally and intellectually mature before they assumed adult roles. Gradually, childhood would come to be thought of as a special stage of life in which people needed careful supervision so as to develop into capable, thinking moral beings.17

  3 Patriarchal Authority

  Because other institutions such as the aristocracy and the church were so weak, household government played a more important role in the British North American colonies than it did in Britain. Colonial families in British North America were not only institutions for rearing children; they were also institutions of government, welfare services, and social control.18 Colonial households were patriarchal in form, with the father as the unquestioned head to whom all of the members owed obedience. Fathers had extensive legal powers over their wives, children, and teenaged as well as adult servants and slaves. In turn fathers owed their dependents various obligations: economic support, protection, moral guidance, and a certain amount of religious training (though the degree of obligation to servants and slaves was considerably less than was owed to kin). The theory was that heads of households made up the political community; when men voted on taxes or enforced laws, they did so not only for themselves but also on behalf of their dependents. When men fulfilled their duties to their dependents, they were seen as serving the public good. Even after household government became less pa
triarchal and more paternalistic during the eighteenth century, the theory of the household as the foundation of political society persisted.19

  The list of obligations was long. Fathers were supposed to provide adequate support for their children, as well as religious instruction and a good moral example. They were to prepare their sons for adulthood, either by leaving them property or by teaching them a trade. They were legally required to control unruly behavior and prevent disturbances of the peace by children and servants. Parents (particularly fathers) were expected to supervise the marriage choices and courtship behavior of their children and servants, with the expectation that they would ensure marriages that served the children's long-term interests. Fathers were to assist their daughters by providing them with adequate dowries. And when they died fathers were to divide up their property among their family members in a way that would provide, at a minimum, for the people who had contributed the most to their households, usually the widow and the eldest son.

  To enable them to carry out these expectations, fathers in the British North American colonies had what most of us would consider to be astonishing legal powers, especially in seventeenth-century New England where the ideal of patriarchal government was most influential. In fact, male household heads in the colonies had significantly more legal authority over dependants than their British counterparts. Men were legally entitled to control their children's labor, an entitlement that gave them various kinds of coercive powers: the power to take a child's wages and earnings; to indenture a child to a master, whether or not he liked it; and to decide how a child should be educated. They could also control the decisions of servants, which might seem perfectly just – except that (in the colonies) servants were not typically entitled to leave a household they disliked, and many of them had no choice as to the households in which they were placed until they were emancipated.