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One of the principal authors favored by Garrison in his newspaper and in this compilation was Elizabeth Margaret Chandler (1807-1834), one of the first women to speak publicly against the institution of slavery and make abolition the central theme of her writings. Chandler was a Quaker and published her essays and poems in Genius of Universal Emancipation, the first American antislavery newspaper, established by Benjamin Lundy in Mt. Pleasant, Ohio, in 1821, the same year that Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave state. Together with Chandler, Prudence Crandall was her companion in transforming slavery into a women’s issue. When the American Anti-Slavery Society was founded at the end of 1833, even though no women were included as delegates, they were present. Lucrecia Mott and other Quaker women organized the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society three days later, as a result of their exclusion from the all-male American Anti-Slavery Society. As happened in other reform movements, the antislavery struggle afforded women a space from which they would raise a voice of resistance against the evils of their times without risking their status as respectable true women, as accorded by nineteenth-century liberal gender ideals. In this romantic age, devoted to what Richard S. Newman calls “absolute commitments,” women joined hands with their male reformist partners in what became “a metaphoric war on bondage” (130) through the writing of literature for children.

Juvenile Poems includes poems on the separation of slave parents from their children and the plight of the orphan slave child, and five free-produce poems aimed at encouraging children to abstain from consuming products derived from slave labor: “The Petition of the Sugar-Making Slaves—Humbly Addressed to the Consumers of Sugar,” “An Answer to the Question, ‘Do you Take Sugar in your Tea?’” and “The Sugar Cane,” as well as Chandler’s “The Sugar-Plums” and “Oh Press Me Not to Taste Again.” As Julie L. Holcomb (116) explains, Chandler, like previous eighteenth-century English antislavery authors (Amelia Opie, Priscilla Wakefield, William Cowper, etc.) and American radical abolitionist writers of children’s literature, used “the consumer culture of childhood to teach children the importance of abstention and abolitionism” (116), and “appeals directly to children to reject slavery and the products of slave labor” (117). Children were encouraged to feel the labor exploitation that lies hidden under the surface of confectionery and the ethical reasons for their rejection of these blood-stained delicacies. Holcomb writes that these anti-sugar poems for children “coincided with non-abolitionist debates about the increasing availability of confectionery. The Moral Reformer, the Christian Watchman, the Friend, and the Boston Recorder all published jeremiads against the consumption of sugar. The Colored American warned parents of the danger of confectionery shops and, through its advertisements, promoted the purchase of free-labor sugar.” This anti-sugar literature flourished at the same time that other reformist movements spread throughout the Anglophone transatlantic world. The consumption of sugar was thus linked not only to an urge to boycott an economy based on slavery but to the moral dangers of intemperance. As with anti-alcoholic writings, children were the target of preaching about abstaining from an abusive consumption of sugar as a way to foster discipline and were encouraged to be virtuous citizens.

THE LIBERTY CAP (1846) by Eliza Lee Cabot Follen includes several stories against slavery. The success of the book is evidenced by the several reprints that followed its initial publication, and its title echoes the aspirations towards freedom and the pursuit of liberty with which the Phrygian cap came to be associated during the eighteenth century, especially during the American War of Independence and the French Revolution. The 35-page volume includes two poems, “Am I not a man and a brother?” and “Lines on hearing of the terror of the children of the slaves at the thought of being sold” and four brief stories, “The Liberty Cap,” “Pic-nic at Dedham,” “Dialogue” and “Agrippa.”

Eliza Lee Cabot Follen (1787-1860) was a reformer, educationalist and a children’s writer and, according to Marcus Wood, she became “one of the most revered figures” in Boston antislavery circles (2003: 523). She belonged to a prominent Boston family, and was a follower of Unitarian William E. Channing. Married to Charles Follen, the first German professor at Harvard University, in 1828, both of them became outspoken antislavery activists, a reason that caused her husband’s appointment not to be renewed at that educational institution. She was co-founder of the interracial Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, together with Maria Weston Chapman, a leading Garrisonian abolitionist and editor of The Liberty Bell, by Friends of Freedom, an annual abolitionist gift book.

Follen authored several books and works for children, and edited the first American edition of Grimm’s fairy tales as well as the Sunday school magazine, The Christian Teachers Manual (1828-1830). Her interest in the moral education of the young drove her to translate the French pedagogue François Fénelon’s work and published Selections from the Writings of Fenelon, with a Memoir of his Life in 1829 (Boston: Boston, Hilliard, Gray, Little, and Wilkins). In her introduction she justified her work as a labor of love because “The pure and holy influences of such a spirit should surely be diffused as widely as possible, and this is the design of the present volume” (v). Fénelon deserved to be known by English speakers since “His heart belonged to no creed, no country, but embraced the earth, and soared to heaven. He loved all that was lovely on earth, and his aspirations were to all that is elevated above it. This putting forth of the affections from and above himself, was the ennobling and distinctive trait in the character of Fenelon. He loved men, not because they were of the same race as himself, but because they were susceptible of virtue and happiness. He loved God, not merely as his benefactor, but as the great source of felicity to all sentient existence” (iv).

After the death of her husband in January 1840, among many other writing assignments, she edited The Child’s Friend and Family Magazine (1843-1850), a second Sunday school publication, and a variety of books for children and some titles specifically concerned with the slavery question. As Elizabeth Bancroft Schlesinger writes, Follen was “an active member of abolitionist societies both in Boston and Cambridge, she lectured and wrote countless tracts and helped to organize antislavery bazaars to raise funds for the cause” (166).

In a small volume titled To Mothers in the Free States (1855), which is part of the eighth series of antislavery tracts published for free distribution by the American Anti-Slavery Society, Follen appealed to American mothers to act against slavery. Her arguments distinctly explained the uncompromising impetus that emerged in American antislavery writings for children and their authors. In her tract, she discussed the role of mothers in the slavery debate and enthroned American mothers as the essential guides for their children’s indoctrination in the evils of the system. As guardians of their families and keepers of the sacred domestic space, they were endowed with the responsibility of fostering in their sons and daughters an unquestionable sense of racial justice that would keep America loyal to its republican principles of equality and justice. Follen declared:

I speak to mothers. The mothers in the Free States could abolish slavery; American mothers are responsible for American slavery. […]

You will, perhaps, say to me ‘these things may be as you state them, but what can women,—what can we mothers do? why make ourselves miserable at the thought of these terrible facts, when we can do the poor sufferers no good? what can we do?’ I answer, you can do everything; I repeat, you can abolish slavery. Let every mother take the subject to heart, as one in which she has a personal concern. In the silence of night, let her listen to the slave-mothers crying to her for help. Let her prayer for them be her “Soul’s sincere desire.” Let her promise before God to do all she can for their redemption. Let her be faithful to her vow, “in season and out of season,” and watch every opportunity and means of doing, or saying, or suffering anything she can for these poor, dumb and helpless creatures. Let her seek for light how she can best serve their cause. Let the desire to serve thorn go with her where she goes, and dwell a perpetual presence in her home. Let her heart, her understanding, her thoughts, be ever on the alert in their cause. While she must ask for heavenly wisdom to guide her, she must take no council from her fears: she must call no man master. […]

Many will say, “Suppose all our sons were sincerely devoted, what could they do? What steps can they take? The Free States have no power to abolish slavery. Show us some practical way.” It is an old, but true saying, “A will finds a way.” But who does not know that the votes from the Free States made the Fugitive Slave Law and passed the Nebraska Bill? The Free States support Slavery. The Southerners are the Slave Owners, we are the Slave Holders. Put an end to the immoral participation of the Free States, and their almost as criminal indifference, and American Slavery could no longer exist. We are the greater sinners, for we have the baser motives for our share in this iniquity. A selfish fear of harm to ourselves keeps us quiet, while we see our Republic scorned or mourned over by the lovers of Justice throughout the world. No old sacred remembrances, no time-honored prejudices, no tender associations of early and childish attachments, none of all these things can be pleaded in extenuation of our conduct. Not one of us thinks Slavery right; nay, we declare it to be a sin; out of our own mouths we are condemned. […] I say, then, to mothers in the Free States, you have before you a solemn duty, a glorious work. […]

Mothers in the Free States, I tell you no idle dream; I present no visionary impracticable idea. I tell you the simple truth, when I say you can, if you will, abolish slavery. The tender heart of the boy is in the hands of the mother. From her he receives his first impressions of right and wrong— impressions which remain to him through life, mingled with the memory of his first and happiest hours. When he is tempted to abandon “the highest right, to make a compromise with wrong, to adopt a time-serving policy dignified by the name of prudence and defended on the plea of necessity; then shall the memory of his mother and her faithful words come back to him—the angel of his early days. In that presence, the tempter shall stand rebuked, and take his true shape of cowardice and sin. Therefore, O my countrywomen, I call upon you, I plead with you to take up this cause with a heroic faith, a martyr-like fidelity, an unquenchable courage!

I am myself a mother. I am bound with the same ties that you are. I have counted the cost, and know what I demand of you. But the time has come when woman must come to the rescue in this land. As women, our all is at stake. We have, above every other motive, that especial call for our devotion—our children. They are, at once, the pledges of our sincerity and the tests of our courage. Let us not be found wanting.

In fact, abolitionist writings for children, as Harriet H. Alonso explains, with their portraits of “close-knit affectionate families fit in well with the nineteenth-century middle-class efforts to restructure the image of the home from the rule of the despotic father and submissive mother to one of more cooperative or ‘companionate’” (101).

In her poetry Follen had “an almost Blakean delight in, and reverence for, the visionary qualities of childish imagination,” and she is, according to Marcus Wood, “at her best as a slavery poet when she seems to speak as a child to children” (2003: 523). Robyn Russo (75) analyses the poem “Lines: On hearing of the terror of the children of American slaves at the thought of being sold,” which includes two stanzas bluntly contrasting the ideal performance of childhood and the way slavery forbids this performance. The first one presents an ideal picture of childhood which is contradicted by the second. The two sides of the same coin. Slavery does not only destroy black children’s innocence but also prevents black mothers from fulfilling their responsibilities. De Rosa argues that juvenile abolitionist literature modified this trope by presenting stories about “young victims who do not need moral reform but instead need rescue from an immoral institution” (2003: 43).

For Russo (80), Follen, like other abolitionist writers for children, aimed to raise her little readers’ sympathy, to feel for the slaves, to engage them in a personal transformation that would spur social change. In “A Pic-nic at Dedham,” she adopted the voice of a child who writes letters as part of a number of letters written by a young boy to his mother that appeared in Follen’s The Child’s Friend and Family Magazine. In this letter, the boy writes about his visit to a fair celebrating the anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the West Indies on August 1, 1834. After listening to the speeches and looking at the antislavery banners displayed at the gathering, the boy asks for his parents’ opinions on abolitionists since he has always heard them speak about their “fanaticism” and what he has discovered at the fair does not match the image he has been made to believe at home. The display opens up his eyes and his heart and he converts to the abolitionist faith: “I think if the men don’t all do something about slavery soon, we boys had better see what we can do, for it is too wicked.” Follen shows how children can become teachers to their parents as well as moral saviors of America.

The Liberty Cap closes with a biographical sketch on Agrippa Hull, the black man who served in the Revolutionary War. This African American patriot was born in 1759 and died at the age of eighty-nine in 1848, two years after Follen’s text appeared. Historian Gary B. Nash notes that he was “one of the most remarkable and unnoticed African Americans of the revolutionary era.” Yet, this sketch shows that abolitionist writers for children such as Follen attempted to preserve the memory of those black individuals who had contributed to American history and had sacrificed their lives to the cause of freedom. After her interview with Agrippa, then an old man, Follen highlighted “the acuteness and wisdom of his views” as well as his reconciliatory spirit, and ended with his comments on the righteousness of the abolitionists’ efforts, words that legitimize their crusade against slavery: “The abolitionists have the great happiness of working for a cause in which they know that they will have God on their side.”

In 1846, the same year Follen’s The Liberty Cap appeared, Hannah and Mary Townsend published their primer THE ANTI-SLAVERY ALPHABET. In The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from ‘The New England Primer’ to ‘The Scarlet Letter,’ Patricia Crain writes that the alphabet is “the technology with which American culture has long spoken to its children and within which it has symbolically represented and formed them” (4). Abolitionist writers were aware of the crucial role of these texts and contemplated them as an ideal medium to deliver their messages and transform young Americans. The Anti-Slavery Alphabet consisted of sixteen hand-sewn pages, and its letters were colored by hand. The book was first sold at the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society fair in December 1846. This interracial society had been founded in 1833 as a sister organization of the American Anti-Slavery Society. It defended racial and gender equality, as well as the general radical principle that slavery contradicted Christianity and the American tenets of the Declaration of Independence. Similarly to other antislavery groups, its efforts were directed toward abolition. To that end, boycotts on products derived from slave labor, fairs to support help fugitive slaves, and literature to promote antislavery ideas were organized and encouraged.

The Anti-Slavery Alphabet starts with a short poem, “To Our Little Readers,” in which children, even if they are recognized to be in their early infancy, were told about their extraordinary power to change injustices in their contemporary world through a number of different ways. This “much that you can do” consisted of three strategies suited to their ages and circumstances. Firstly, they could engage themselves in the antislavery fight by confronting potential buyers of slaves and actual owners; secondly, they could become preachers of antislavery doctrines among their own peers by making use of the sentimental stories describing the brutal consequences of family separations; and thirdly, they could confront the American economy based on slave labor by joining the boycott on goods produced in the South, mainly sugar, and become antisacharist activists.

Each letter of the alphabet is transformed into a powerful carrier of an antislavery message materialized in a simple poem that could be easily memorized by the readers. The association between the letter and its antislavery meaning works as a formidable condemnation of the institution in all its aspects—the separation of families, the cruel treatment of slaves, the Christian brotherhood of all men, and the denunciation of Southerners and Northerners, as well as of products associated with slavery.

The Anti-Slavery Alphabet was reviewed and celebrated in the Quaker The British Friend: A Monthly Journal Chiefly Devoted to the Interests of the Society of Friends (September 1849, 220), and joined the ranks of those who warmly recommended the text to parents and teachers, and cherished the gratifying possibility of a new edition to be issued in Belfast, Ireland. As was customary, the journal reproduced a previously published notice. On this occasion, it took one from the Pennsylvania Freeman, since this review contained “just remarks upon the importance of enlisting the feelings of children, in very early periods of life, to sympathize with the oppressed, we cannot do better than give them to our readers.” The article started by drawing attention to the importance of primers and children’s early readings: “The depth and endurance of early impressions, and the importance of enlisting the hearts of children in every good work—both for themselves and the cause—is too generally acknowledged to need new proof or assertion. The experience of ages has tested the wisdom of the counsel. ‘In the morning sow thy seed;’ and this maxim now shapes the policy of the advocates of almost every enterprise, religious, political, or moral. There is probably no more effective enginery, either for good or evil to man, than the books for children in popular circulation. This remark applies to all civilized nations, but peculiarly to a republic where the power of the government and all the institutions of society spring directly from the people. The sagacity of the religious sects of our country long since discovered this, and suggested most extensive and active measures to secure its advantages. They have scattered their child’s book, cards, papers, primers and toy-symbols, through almost every community in the land, making every play-house and nursery into a school of moral sentiment or theological theories, and abundantly have they reaped the fruit of this labour.” The writer went on to highlight the scarcity of titles published for children on the slavery issue and, consequently, the outstanding relevance of The Anti-Slavery Alphabet: “We cannot too fully appreciate, or heartily adopt this wise policy in the spread of anti-slavery truth. We have long regretted the paucity of anti-slavery works for children, and wished that more of our writers would employ their talents and genius in supplying the deficiency. No publication has done more to gratify this wish, than the little work before us. It has already had a wide circulation, and our readers are, many of them, familiar with it; but the repeated testimonies to its excellence, which we hear from persons of intelligence and sound judgment, and our own appreciation of its merits, prompt us to allude to it again. It is admirably adapted to enlist the sympathies, and elevate the moral nature of children, while serving to amuse and instruct them. The author has done a service to her little readers, and to parents and teachers, for which she deserves their gratitude. The ‘seed’ she has sown will spring up and bear good fruit in a thousand fields which she thinks not of, and the gladness of many young hearts all over our land will be a free thank-offering to her. We cannot compare this Alphabet with the nonsensical trash of the rhyming alphabet generally put into the hands of children without wondering that the old doggerel has not long before been displaced by something more decent and refined.” This review attests to the transatlantic reception of American abolitionist writings for children and their appreciation outside the borders of the United States.

In 1848, Jane Elizabeth Jones, a reputed antislavery speaker who worked under the auspices of the Boston Anti-Slavery Office, with William Lloyd Garrison and other well-known abolitionists, published THE YOUNG ABOLITIONISTS; OR CONVERSATIONS ON SLAVERY. According to Susan E. J. Landwer, Jones was “an iconoclast in her era but has yet to be recovered in new archaeologies of woman’s rights history and historical assumptions of the 19th century fight for universal rights” (39). This scholar criticizes the fact that when twenty-first-century historians of abolitionism have determined that the most prominent activists fighting for universal rights were Garrisonian abolitionists, they have left out Jones, “one of their biggest advocates and speakers,” a woman who “prefigured contemporary criticism of ‘founding fathers’ and the pretensions of the North during the Civil War period by pointing out their hypocrisy decades before our ‘official’ history was revised” (47-48).

Together with her husband, Benjamin Smith Jones, Jones reorganized the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society into the Western Anti-Slavery Society, and they both became editors of the Salem newspaper The Anti-Slavery Bugle, from 1846 to 1849, a publication heavily influenced by Garrison’s radical abolitionist doctrines, and to which she contributed with articles. Salem was a city in northern Columbiana County, a location with a long history of abolitionism for it had a predominantly Quaker population and was also an active Underground Railroad station. The newspaper’s motto displayed on the front page was “No Union with Slaveholders,” which aligned The Anti-Slavery Bugle with Wendell Phillips’s and William Lloyd Garrison’s radical ideology of the time. As explained by the Ohio Historical Society, “in its first issue the Bugle declared: ‘Our mission is a great and glorious one. It is to preach deliverance to the captive, and the opening of the prison door to them that are bound; to hasten in the day when ‘liberty shall be proclaimed throughout all the land, unto all inhabitants thereof.’ To that end, the paper and the society supported women’s rights and criticized churches that neglected the antislavery cause.” The Anti-Slavery Bugle “printed letters and speeches, including Sojourner Truth’s 1851 ‘Ain’t I a Woman’ speech, along with calls-for-meetings and editorials that supported its goals,” and it “was also involved in the peace movement, opposing the American government’s involvement in the Mexican War.”

Jones was also the author of many editorials defending abolitionism and women’s suffrage. She became Abby Kelley’s companion in these struggles as well as a participant at the Ohio Woman Suffrage Convention in 1850. As Landwer explains, Jones was “such a prominent human activist that she was asked to defend the woman suffrage cause in the (Ohio) Senate chamber, before their joint Committee and such of the General Assembly and of the public, as might choose to come and listen” (39). During the year 1850 Jones focused on women’s rights and participated in a number of national conventions. Her speech ‘The Wrongs of Woman,’ delivered before the Ohio Women’s Convention in Salem on April 19, 1850, starts: “There is not, perhaps, in the wide field of reform, any one subject so difficult to discuss as that of Woman’s Rights. I use the term ‘Woman’s Rights,’ because it is a technical phrase. I like not the expression. It is not Woman’s Rights of which I design to speak, but of Woman’s Wrongs. I shall claim nothing for ourselves because of our sex—I shall demand the recognition of no rights on the ground of our womanhood. In the contest which is now being waged in behalf of the enslaved colored man in this land, I have yet to hear the first word in favor of his rights as a colored man; the great point which is sought to be established is this, that the colored. man is a human being, and as such, entitled to the free exercise of all the rights which belong to humanity. And we should demand our recognition as equal members of the human family; as persons to whom pertain all the rights which grow out of our relations to God, and to each other, as human beings; and when this point is once established, the term ‘Woman’s Rights’ will become obsolete, for none will entertain the idea that the rights of women differ from the rights of men. It is then human rights for which we contend” (52).

The Young Abolitionists; or Conversations on Slavery presents a series of conversations between a mother, Mrs. Selden, and her three children to fiercely attack the passivity of the American government towards the continuation of slavery, blame the North for being an accomplice to the South, and describe many of the consequences and facts of slavery. The imperative that runs through the text is to convince its young readers to become abolitionists and active agents in setting examples of moral conduct. The lessons imparted in these dialogues understate the fact that the American family is the place to instill antislavery doctrines. Parental example must precede moral instruction, as shown by the fact that the Seldens hide a group of runaway slaves. Deborah De Rosa notes that “Mrs. Selden’s escalating denunciation includes explaining the differences between plantation and house servants; documenting the physical and emotional abuse slaves endure from both male and female slave owners; exposing forefathers like George Washington who owned slaves; (and) condemning Northerners who openly support slavery or those who perpetuate it by not speaking against it” (2005: 102).

The Young Abolitionist was reviewed twice in The North Star, Frederick Douglass’s antislavery newspaper. The first recommendation was by Douglass and it appeared in the issue of December 8, 1848: “This is the title of a neat little volume by Mrs. Jane Elizabeth Jones, of Salem, Ohio. It is well written and nicely adapted to the wants of the rising generation. Mrs. Jones has done the cause of the slave a great service, by turning her attention to this department of antislavery effort. In our impatience to see the result of our labors, in the destruction of slavery, we have hitherto devoted little time to impressing the young with antislavery sentiments and principles. The wisdom of this course may be fairly doubted. We have reason to believe that to the young of this day the slave and this country are to be indebted for emancipation. The sale of this admirable book ought to be immense.” The second review—written on November 12, 1848, but published on Friday January 19, 1849—was penned by Henry C. Wright, a defender of militant abolitionism and “‘the children’s agent’ of the American Anti-Slavery Society” (Alonso 100), who highlighted the strength and courage of Jones in flattering terms: “Dear Friends, Before me is a work entitled The Young Abolitionists, or, Conversations on Slavery; by J. Elizabeth Jones. It is just from the Anti-Slavery press of Boston. I have read this little book with great profit and satisfaction. The principles, practices and spirit of American Slavery are brought out in it clearly and distinctly, and to the comprehension of the class of readers for whose benefit it was designed. It was written for children; and the child who begins to read it will not be likely to lay it aside till it is read through. It is in the form of Dialogue, and the conversation is carried on with spirit and animation. The author has contrived to impart instruction to children on the most radical and only true principles of Anti-Slavery. I see not how any child can read that book or hear it read, and not receive lasting benefit. The writer has done a good work for Anti-Slavery. She has struck a blow for Freedom in the right place. If the children of Ohio could get at that book, and read it, and imbibe its spirit, it would matter but little what constitutions or laws were made to uphold the system of fraud and violence. Slavery would be dead in the State, and nothing could keep it alive. One effort made with children, tells more powerfully against slavery than ten made with adults. Children are born abolitionists; this work is designed to keep them so, and to prevent them from imbibing the spirit of violence and oppression that is so rife around them in this land of boasted liberty. The facts and illustrations embodied in The Young Abolitionists are pertinent and forcible, and peculiarly fitted to make a deep and abiding impression on the hearts of children in favor of human liberty. It would greatly benefit the righteous cause of Anti-Slavery, and help to hasten the day of the slave’s redemption, if the Abolitionists of this State and of the country would take measures to get that book into general circulation.” As with other abolitionist texts for children, reviewers praised Jones’s most needed efforts to contribute to the crusade against slavery by educating American children from their infancy to confront patriotically the wrongs of their country.

In 1849 Ann Preston published COUSIN ANN’S STORIES FOR CHILDREN. Preston (1813-1872) was a Quaker activist and a doctor. In her chapter on Preston, “Invisible Writing I: Ann Preston Invents and Institution” in Out of the Dead House: Nineteenth-Century Women Physicians and the Writing of Medicine (2001), Susan Wells explained that Preston was thirty-eight when she graduated with the first class from the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1850, and later became a professor of physiology and Dean in this institution. She was a prolific writer, but many of her texts appeared anonymously. Preston did not challenge contemporary gender expectations but, as Wells wrote, she navigated within the traditional venues of a separate sphere for women “to construct a rhetoric which supported women physicians,” a strategy, “functional in protecting the new Woman’s Medical College, and costly, both personally and professionally” (13). As a young woman, she participated in the intellectual life of her community, and became secretary to its antislavery society.

Her book of nursery rhymes and short stories for children, Cousin Ann’s Stories for Children, written under the pseudonym of “Cousin Ann,” illustrates her commitment to antislavery politics, and the virtues of temperance, social justice and Christian charity. In her address “To My Little Readers,” she explains that the inspiration of her book goes back to the times of her infancy and the contrast she perceives between the past and the present, and how she hopes her lessons might help her readers grow and become conscious adults: “I shall be pleased if you learn something good and pleasant from it. You will soon be men and women, and I want you to grow wiser and better every day.” Preston’s response to contemporary incidents related to slavery is shown in her text on Henry “Box” Brown, the Richmond slave who escaped north to Philadelphia and freedom, hidden inside a wooden crate at the end of March, 1849. Brown’s heroic feat was widely rewritten in newspapers, print satires, children’s books, abolitionist almanacs, history books, and pamphlets. The climax of his story was his emerging from the packing crate and the illustration for that moment became “one of the most widely disseminated pictures in the abolition publications of the 1850s, on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as the climactic image for the enormous panorama of oil paintings with which Brown toured the towns of Free North of America, and later Europe” according to Marcus Wood (2000: 103). Wood also noted that “the final proof of the extent to which Brown’s narrative was transferred into the currencies of popular culture lay in the rapidity with which he was absorbed into the children’s book market.” For Wood, the inclusion of the story in Cousin Ann’s Stories was “particularly ingenious, because of the way the plates marry it to a well-established didactic abolition trope” (2000: 113). Even though all versions present the method he used to escape, as Martha J. Cutter explained, “they vary as to what happened when Brown’s box was opened.” This is relevant since the explanations and illustrations accompanying this sensational denouement of the escape discover many of “the tensions within abolitionist visual culture concerning representations of enslaved subjectivity” (2017: 18).

The first full version of Brown’s story was written for an adult audience and it was titled Narrative of Henry Box Brown, Who Escaped from Slavery, Enclosed in a Box 3 Feet Long and 2 Wide: Written from a Statement of Facts Made by Himself; With Remarks Upon the Remedy for Slavery. It was published in September 1849, six months after Brown’s escape with the help of radical abolitionist Charles Stearns. As with many other texts written and published by abolitionists about slaves’ lives, the white voice writes the black voice into being, a process that was liable to factual and ideological manipulations. This biased understanding of the slave’s daring act is also shown in the visual material illustrating the moment in which Brown triumphantly breaks free from his crate imprisonment. As Cutter explained, this first account, unlike Preston’s retelling for children, does not include an image of Brown stepping out of his box, but “a drawing of Brown (the man) starts the text, and a drawing of the box ends it,” illustrations that make Brown “visually separated from the innovative mode of escape he deployed. Stearns’s Brown is told by God, ‘Go and get a box, and put yourself in it’—a command that Brown does not initially understand: ‘Get a box?’ … ‘What can this mean?’” Consequently, in this first version of the text, the fugitive Brown “lacks the imagination or intelligence to fashion the scheme himself” (2017: 198).

Conversely, as Cutter remarks, Ann Preston’s text “grants Brown a degree of control over his famous exit from the box”: “Quickly the top of the box was knocked off, and Henry stood up. He shook hands with his new friend, and he was so happy that he hardly knew what to do. After he had bathed himself and ate breakfast, he sang a hymn of praise, which he had kept in his mind to sing if he should ever get to a land of freedom in safety.” Preston’s book was published by James Miller McKim, who helped Brown escape and who was present when the fugitive stepped out of the box. Preston, Cutter writes, sees Brown as heroic—“We call people heroes who do something that is brave and great, and Henry is a hero”—, an estimation reinforced by this first visual representation of this crucial moment. In this image, readers could see Brown standing and shaking the hand of the white man who has presumably opened the box with the axe he holds in his hand. Next to this individual stands another white man, near one half of the top of the box with the letters “This side up.” The other half bears the letters “Thomas Wilson,” a false name to protect the real identity of the recipient, who is the man who welcomes Henry Brown. For Elizabeth Freeman, the picture is controversial since, “though the whitened hand is probably intended to indicate that Brown is holding his palm outward, it has the effect of suggesting that liberation occurs on white people’s terms or ‘whitens’ Brown, while the submersion of Brown’s lower third in the box suggests that he is not yet fully free” (72). Cutter, however, reads the image from a different angle and states that it “endeavors to create visual structures of parity and equality between Brown and the white men who open his box: Brown stands tall and straight; he looks at the white man and holds out his hand; he is similar in size to the other figures. Most of his body is above the perspective line of the illustration, so a viewer would tend to look straight at him rather than casting a downward glance.” Given the fact that the image is presented before the text, Cutter believes that the picture “would tend to become a focalizing presence and dovetail with the point Preston makes at the text’s end about Brown’s heroism” (2017: 198).

Thus, in her “Henry Box Brown” Preston pays a double homage. Firstly to the white abolitionists who defied the law to help a fugitive slave, and secondly, and most important, to the courage and audacity of Henry Brown, the slave who risked his life to escape from slavery.

Jonathan Walker’s A PICTURE OF SLAVERY FOR YOUTH (184[?]) was published after 1845 and the picture of his branded hand is one of the most publicized of the visual archive generated by abolition. Robin Bernstein explains (103) that “the ultimate impression of slavery is the burn-wound, the brand.” Walker (1799-1878), a captain of a fishing vessel and an antislavery activist, was condemned as a slave stealer by a Southern court after unsuccessfully trying to transport seven fugitive slaves from Florida to the British West Indies in 1844. After a year in jail, he was sentenced to “a fine, an hour in the pillory, and, in a most unusual punishment, he was branded with the letters ‘SS’—slave stealer—below the thumb of his right hand” (Bernstein 103). After this incident, Walker became an antislavery speaker. John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a 52-line poem celebrating his heroic feat titled “The Man with the Branded Hand,” a name by which he became known in national antislavery circles after reading the pamphlet that the Anti-Slavery Office in Boston published in 1845 titled Trial and Imprisonment of Jonathan Walker, at Pensacola, Florida, for Aiding Slaves to Escape from Bondage. With an Appendix Containing a Sketch of His Life, with a Preface by Maria Weston Chapman. Walker wrote countless articles for William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator, and lectured for the next seven years on the issue of slavery throughout New England. After his autobiographical account of his trial and imprisonment, he published A Brief View of American Chattelized Humanity and Its Supports (1846).

Whittier immortalized Walker’s deed in the often reprinted lines 41-42 of his poem: “Then lift that manly right hand, bold ploughman of the wave! / Its branded palm shall prophesy, ‘Salvation to the Slave!’” Harriet Beecher Stowe also paid homage to Walker’s branded hand in Uncle Tom’s Cabin when she also had her heroic fugitive George Harris’s hand branded. In fact, Walker’s image of his branded hand was daguerreotyped and later turned into a woodcut illustration. He was instrumental in transforming his wound into an abolitionist symbol not only by writing his story but, more important, by “disseminating mass-reproduced images of his hand in broadsides, periodicals, and children’s books, where the image was often accompanied by John Greenleaf Whittier’s ballad, ‘The Branded Hand’” (Bernstein 103). Taking Marcus Wood’s coinage, the picture of Walker’s branded hand, mass-produced by the thousand and distributed in countless manifold printed media, was aimed at the “hagiographic construction” of Walker as a white champion of abolition (2000: 8). Yet, as Wood writes (2013: 238), “[i]ronically, this cauterized hand was the most widely marketed image of branded flesh to come out of the Atlantic slavery.”

In the Preface to A Picture of Slavery for Youth, Walker wrote about how his devotion to the welfare of the slaves and to others “who are degraded and oppressed” urged him to pen his text, “hoping they will be the means of awakening many to just thoughts, feelings and conduct, in relation to the system of slavery in these UNITED STATES.” Some pictures of his text were taken from George Bourne’s Picture of Slavery in the United States of America (Middletown, Connecticut: Edwin Hunt, 1834), with wood engravings designed by H.A. Munson and G.W. Flagg; and Slavery Illustrated in Its Effects Upon Woman’s Domestic Society (Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1837), both books were republished several times throughout the 1830s. Bourne was a radical abolitionist who called for the “immediate emancipation without compensation” of American slaves. His two books sought to represent slavery visually, without the direct testimony of the formerly enslaved eyewitness, and thus rely on graphically written descriptions and woodcut illustrations of the tortures endured by slaves to impress upon his readers the horrors of enslavement in the U.S. South. In Picture of Slavery, Bourne wrote: “The engravings illustrate slavery as it may be seen in its various degrees of turpitude, among all classes of American man-stealers, whether they are avowed infidels, or nominal Christians” (7). As Teresa Goddu explains, “[b]y painting the horrors of the slave plantation as a gothic scene of unending cruelty, Bourne exposes the truth beneath the South’s polite veneer and constructs slavery as a sin against God as well as a crime against humanity. Bourne uses the gothic to render slavery socially unacceptable: readers are asked to recoil from slavery’s ‘odious wickedness (Bourne 122) and to censure its villains’ ‘enormous crimes’ (Bourne 44).” Moreover, the abolitionist “deploys the gothic’s affective register of dread and terror to create a response of revulsion in the face of slavery’s debasing acts” (2016: 38). These illustrations, together with the explicit descriptions of cruelties perpetrated against the enslaved and real newspaper advertisements of slaves for sale, worked to leave nothing to the imagination of the child readers of the book. As Joe Richardson states, “[c]ertainly his method of combining advertisements, comments, and pictures must have created indignation in many a youth.” Readers of A Picture of Slavery for Youth were adamantly “implored to make slavery their cause” (lxxviii). As he highlighted in his Preface, Walker wanted to impress the minds of the young, since their impressions were tightly “connected with the destinies of the future.”

Post-Uncle Tom’s abolitionist writings for children

The appearance of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1851/52—the most important book to portray slavery in the United States—signaled a turning point in American antislavery writings and, consequently, in abolitionist writings for children. The phenomenal reception of the novel “confirmed that sentimental images of children and families were especially effective in helping antebellum America feel for the nation’s slaves” (De Schweinitz 15).

PICTURES AND STORIES FROM UNCLE TOM’S CABIN stands as an early transformation of Stowe’s novel into a children’s book. The volume, published by John P. Jewett in United States and T. Nelson and Sons in London in January 1853, less than a year after the novel appeared, shows the strategies used to conform the text to a juvenile audience, and how the highly political content was sugar-coated both textually and visually to present a palatable antislavery agenda. In contrast to previous radical abolitionist texts for children, Stowe’s adaptation of her novel appeared cloaked with an antislavery cultural and political capital that afforded the book the possibility to enter a wider circle of American middle-class homes, previously out of bounds to polarized antislavery narratives. The book is “a well-constructed text,” with “[t]houghtful transitions and deft elaborations,” which “create a tightly woven narrative that reads smoothly, despite massive cuts” (Hochman 105). Barbara Hochman considers that Pictures and Stories is an important version that appealed to children, “in part because the book violated widely shared conventions for antebellum children’s reading” (105). The introductory page states the didactic aims of the text as a morally enlightened writing for children that aims to encourage a compelling sense of sympathy for the social outcasts: “This little work is designed to adapt Mrs. Stowe’s touching narrative to the understanding of the youngest readers and to foster in their hearts a generous sympathy for the wronged negro race of America.” Then, on the following page, the editor explains what the abridgement and simplification of the text has entailed. Firstly, it declares the aim of the adaption, the active participation of Stowe herself in rewriting some parts of the content in verse and the typographic traits established to facilitate the reading of these poems by the youngest readers, as well as the attempt to engage the collaboration of the older members of the family for the prose parts written in smaller type: “The purpose of the Editor of this little Work, has been to adapt it for the juvenile family circle. The verses have accordingly been written by the Authoress for the capacity of the youngest readers, and have been printed in a large bold type. The prose parts of the book, which are well suited for being read aloud in the family circle, are printed in a smaller type, and it is presumed that in these our younger friends will claim the assistance of their older brothers or sisters, or appeal to the ready aid of their mamma.”

Stowe had skillfully blended nineteenth-century sentimental fictional conventions to describe the evils of the national sin, creating black characters with whom white middle-class readers could easily identify and sympathize. As a children’s story and in contrast to later versions, Pictures and Stories from Uncle Tom’s Cabin does not “rely on the racialized stereotypes of the original” (105) but changes the original novel in two ways. Firstly, “by minimizing racial markers,” such as racialized language and physical descriptions of the black characters; and secondly, by restructuring the tale and “maximizing the powerful motifs of fairy tale and legend” in creating the characters of the two main black child characters in the tale (Hochman 105), Harry, the son of George and Eliza, and Topsy, the wild slave girl whom Miss Ophelia attempts to reform and convert, and who will learn the tenets of the Christian faith, love and respect, by following the example of angelical little Eva. These two figures “challenged common antebellum assumptions about racial difference, children’s reading, and sympathy,” and offered substantial means of “absorption and identification” to white middle-class young readers (Hochman 106).

Together with the publication of Pictures and Stories from Uncle Tom’s Cabin John P. Jewett also took advantage of the sensational reception of Uncle Tom’s Cabin to issue three texts—Minnie May, and Other Rhymes, Grandmother’s Stories for Little Children and The Edinburgh Doll and Other Tales for Children— in his antislavery toy book series. THE EDINBURGH DOLL AND OTHER TALES FOR CHILDREN (1854) appeared as written by Aunt Mary, a pseudonym. Scholars are not sure about the author’s identity. Deborah De Rosa, in her anthology of abolitionist juvenile literature, suggests that she may have been Mrs. Hughes, a Briton who emigrated to Philadelphia and wrote children’s stories under this very same pen-name (2005: 215) or, as Sara Lindey proposes, she might have been Mary Low, who wrote A Peep Into Uncle Tom’s Cabin, under the name of Aunt Mary, a book also published by John R. Jewett (72).

The Edinburgh Doll tells the story of little Mary, who falls ill because she feels too deeply for slaves. Confronted with death, she donates her doll to a Boston abolitionist fair to be auctioned together with a picture of Eva, the angelical child in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in a reenactment of the well-known nineteenth-century literary death-bed scene. The protagonist of the poem is thus explicitly inspired by Eva St. Clair, the immaculate child, whose death redeems her family and slaves from the evil enclosed in the slavery system. As the epitome of the sentimental child, Eva’s death resembles a Christian-like martyrdom. Her sacrifice as an innocent embodiment of the pains of slavery is aimed at converting the people around her to the antislavery political agenda. For De Rosa, little Mary shows herself to be a more powerful character than Stowe’s Eva since she “empowers females—Mary, her mother, and her doll—not only to voice their political views but also to participate as successful public, abolitionist activists” (2005: 216). The story highlights the power of writing and specifically the impact of abolitionist texts for children, about the abuses of the system, since it is through reading that the protagonist comes to understand and feel with the exploited enslaved women, men and children.

LOUISA IN HER NEW HOME appeared in 1854. The author’s name, S.C.C., has been identified as belonging to Sarah C. Carter (De Rosa 2005: 161), since the title page refers to her as the author of The Wonderful Mirror (1855). She was also the editor of The Choice Gift, or Golden Sands, from the River of Literature “like spangles shining through the crystal wave” (Boston: J. Buffum, 1850), which includes pieces by Mrs. Sigourney, John Locke, H.W. Longfellow, Mrs. Hemans, and many other well-known English language writers; and in 1853 she authored Lexicon of Ladies’ Names, with Their Floral Emblems (Boston: J. Buffum).

Louisa in her New Home was published by the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, an organization founded by James and Lucretia Mott, and Robert Purvis, among others, in 1838. Historian Ira V. Brown explains (63-64) that, after the schism that the American Anti-Slavery Society suffered in 1840 because of the internal disagreement on Garrison’s increasing radicalism with its anticlerical and disunionist views, the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society remained loyal to Garrisonian principles —“No Union with Slaveholders”—even if it was difficult for some of its members to accept Garrison’s hostility to political action and continue with his moral suasion strategies. Thus, “the work of the society consisted largely of a many-sided propaganda campaign, designed primarily to persuade Northern people to stop condoning and supporting the institution of slavery” (66). After 1845 it concentrated mainly on running “the operations of the underground railroad, in which many of its members were deeply involved,” since “Philadelphia was one of the few places where the business of helping fugitive slaves to escape was well organized, under the direction of an efficient Vigilance Committee” (67-68). It is important to remember that in 1849 Henry “Box” Brown had himself crated in a wooden box and shipped to Philadelphia, and had been welcomed by members of the Society.

Sarah C. Carter may have been a member of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society and, as her text evinces, she was well aware of the keen interest of its members in helping fugitives as well as in “the various court cases growing out of resistance to the fugitive slave law, such as the notorious treason trials resulting from the Christiana Riot of 1851” (Brown 68). In September of that year in Christiana, Pennsylvania, a slave owner arrived to retrieve six of his escaped slaves, who were being protected by a local vigilance group that was helped by more than fifty African Americans living in the area. The confrontation between the two parties resulted in a violent riot with the death of the slave owner, and thirty-nine men, white and black, arrested and brought to trial on federal charges of treason on the basis of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. By the end of 1851 the arrested had all been released. Their acquittal was saluted as a major blow to pro-slavery politics and a victory against the injustice of the Fugitive Slave Act. The passage of the federal Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 authorized slaveholders to pursue fugitive slaves into any territory of the United States, and claim them as property that had to be taken back to their rightful owners. Moreover, Section 7 of the Act declared that those persons who helped the fugitives or hindered the efforts of their owners to apprehend them would face legal consequences of fines and imprisonment. As seen above, this Fugitive Slave Act encouraged many people, not necessarily with abolitionist sympathies, to act against a law they considered to be unjust.

Louise in her New Home is a story that encourages children to take action against this wrong and claims that a type of civil disobedience has to be embraced by all Americans of all ages. Since the law was protecting an immoral institution, children were marshaled against it and called to break the commandment. Louisa, the central character of the narrative, is a girl protected by the comforts and love of her family. Economic upheavals threaten to disrupt her idyllic childhood, a moment that becomes the turning point of her journey towards adulthood. As in many of the abolitionist stories, it is the mother who sets an example and unveils the subversive possibilities of the domestic space. She brings Louisa to a full identification with the plight of Mary, the runaway slave, sheltered by the family, even at the risk of the girl’s health when she is exposed to the bitter truths of these racial inequalities and feels severely shocked.

As the cover illustration makes clear, even if the fact that black persons born in American could be bought and sold, and separated from their families and “work without wages” is seen outside the home, the mother argues for the political commitment of those inside the house with the enslaved outside it. In Louisa’s “new home” there is no space for narcissistic self-contemplation. “You must try, my daughter, to forget your own sufferings in hearing about others,” says Louisa’s mother and urges her to take action: “When we know the truth we are better able to act, better able to decide what we ought to do. Now, if you think you can’t bear to hear and know about this slavery which is in your own country, you can turn away from it and try to forget it by amusing yourself and taking up other subjects that are not so painful. […] but we must act as well as feel; and as soon as you begin to do something you will bear better the knowledge of this painful truth.” Moreover, the mother encourages Louisa to perform an act of civil disobedience on behalf of the truthfulness of a higher law: “Yes, there are many good men and women who write against slavery, and some who devote much time and money to show the evils of slavery, and that it is opposed to that law which God has planted in the heart of every one to make him feel about it, as you do Louisa; and that when men for selfish purposes make such a law as forces Mary to leave us, that it is a wicked law, which must not be obeyed; and that you, and every body, whether man, woman, or child, should do all that is possible against it. A strong desire to do right shows a way to everybody, whether man or woman, boy or girl. So don’t think anything about whether you are a man or woman, but, whether you are to take sides with the right or the wrong, whatever it may be about.” The story turns out to be a radical statement against the passive acceptance of the Fugitive Slave Act and the active engagement of children in its demise. Louisa is guided by her mother to transform her intuitive empathy into a political force to protest against the system she naturally abhors. As with other abolitionist fictional mothers, Louisa’s is charged with the moral upbringing of her children so that they can step outside into the social world of nineteenth-century America and become critical thinkers and political agents.

In 1855 Harriet Newell Greene published RALPH; OR, I WISH HE WASN’T BLACK. Greene (1819-1881) was a writer, journalist and spiritualist who lived in Hopedale, Milford, Massachusetts, the utopian community founded in 1842 by Adin Ballou, a minister of the community of Practical Christians. Ballou, a pacifist, abolitionist, and defender of temperance, spiritualism and women’s rights, believed that his community could be an example of a socially reformed society. Yet, his utopian dreams did not come to full fruition and Hopedale only lasted about fourteen years before going bankrupt in 1856.

Harriet N. Greene, who had arrived in Hopedale in 1852, married Bryan J. Butts in 1858, a native New Yorker and a radical individualist, who joined Ballou’s community in 1852. Harriet would continue to write under her maiden name or under the pen-name of Lida. Both were reformists and members of Ballou’s utopian experiment, and in 1859 started to edit The Radical Spiritualist from May 1859 to October 1860. As utopian idealists, they wrote on a number of topics in the journal for the transformation of their society, including free love, abolition and the plight of fugitive slaves, temperance, spiritualism and women’s rights, among others.

The motto of the journal was “Free to the Outcast; To the Able and Willing, 50 cts. a year in Advance.” In the second issue in June 1859 it announced the editors’ intentions “to use language, on all subjects, which is direct and unequivocal, but to the purity and sincerity of which, every genuine reformer will spontaneously assent. As for others, whose fastidious tastes may be offended, we cannot afford to heed them. Our work is too important. We would have our ‘Voice’ heard in every corner of the globe, were it possible; yea, we would have it heard in the spirit realm, by the ‘spirits in prison.’ But we do not expect a ready hearing” (14). The journal presented itself as designed for a new class of readers that exceeded the categorizations of any spiritualistic publication: “the Outcast, the Degraded, the Prostitute, and the Enslaved.” In fact, the journal favored reformist writings on all subjects besides spiritualism, a theme that was given attention in such sections as “Notes on Spiritualism” and “Editor’s Portfolio,” together with reports of visiting mediums and other journals in the same field. In its first issue it also stated that “The world needs men of sterling worth, aye, and women too; great souls, who dare be true to the teachings of the inward voice—who are capable of feeling the pulsations of the great heart of suffering humanity, as it swells in awful surges like the restless waves upon the billowy ocean […] God is speaking in tones that cannot be mistaken—saying, ‘Labor fearless, labor faithful.’ And shall we, who have heard that voice, cowardly sit with folded hands, not daring to speak against the popular evils of the day? No! We will speak our convictions, whether the world smiles or frowns. We will call Slavery, Slavery; War, War; and Licentiousness, Licentiousness, whether it be hidden away in dark places, or stalks abroad at noonday, with brazen face, in Legislative hulls and Senate chambers” (1). The journal therefore included not only spiritualist themes but a vast range of reformist movements of the time: antislavery, temperance, socialism, women’s rights, vegetarianism, socialism, etc.