Born Criminals: Juvenile Criminal Culpability and the Antebellum Male Slave Narrative

The question of juvenile criminality presents a paradox for child advocates. To hold a child accountable for a criminal act discounts the effects of the child’s familial and cultural climate on his/her behavior. Children... [ view full abstract ]

The question of juvenile criminality presents a paradox for child advocates. To hold a child accountable for a criminal act discounts the effects of the child’s familial and cultural climate on his/her behavior. Children after all have little control over the character of their caregivers or the conditions of their socio-economic environment; a positive change in climate can therefore lead to a positive change in behavior. However, to absolve a child of criminal accountability risks casting the child as a non-agential victim, a reactive automaton who lacks a self-determination that can be rehabilitated. This paradox is particularly acute for Black children whose humanity is always already in question due to the historical emergence of Black subjectivity in a print culture shaped by slavery and associated theories of African-American inferiority. If, as Jeannine Marie DeLombard argues, crime shaped nineteenth-century Black personhood, how can the black child be seen as a potential law-abiding subject? This paper reads child development narratives in Thomas Gray’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831) and Frederick Douglass’ first two autobiographies, Narrative of the Life (1845) and My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), to consider nineteenth-century options for writing the black male child subject into the human and national belonging accorded to white children, and the implications for contemporary narrative redress. As Douglass’ second autobiography suggests, the civic identity of the Black child turns on a Romanticized innocent childhood in which “troubles fall only like water on a duck’s back.”