Anti-Slavery Issue and Children's Magazines: 1820-1860

Anti-Slavery Issue and Children's Magazines: 1820-1860

By the 1820’s the issue of slavery in the southern states had become fraught with controversy. It was by no means a clear-cut difference between Northern and Southern states; many Southerners were against it and many Northerners tolerated it, feeling it was a problem that the South must solve. Most early anti-slavery societies, though, arose in the North and many made efforts to spread their views by publishing. William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator, published weekly between 1831 and 1865, had a Juvenile Department; the paper became the organ for the American Anti-Slavery Society which Garrison started in 1833.

Among the earliest children’s magazines was the Juvenile Miscellany (hereafter JM), begun and edited by Lydia Maria Child, and published in Boston from 1826-1834. It included occasional pieces that dealt with the problem of slavery; Child herself was an ardent abolitionist, but the slavery issue was inflammatory, and to keep her subscription base with the parents and grandparents who paid for it, the problem had to be treated with caution.

Another early periodical, The Slave’s Friend (hereafter TSF), appeared in 1836, published by the New York Anti-Slavery Society; it was specifically addressed to young readers and included abolitionist fiction, poetry, and articles. Like the Liberator it was published not only for the already-converted, but also in hopes of influencing the lukewarm and undecided. There was no question of its single-minded intent.

While TSF and JM had relatively brief runs, the Youth’s Companion (hereafter YC) ran for over a century, from 1827-1929, starting as a weekly family newspaper and later aimed strictly at the young. Its edito...

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...New York Anti-Slavery Society, 1836-38.

Youth’s Companion, ed. Nathaniel Willis, 1827-1929.

Anonymous. Pictures and Stories from Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Boston: John P. Jewett and Co., 1853.

Secondary Sources

MacLeod, Anne Scott. A Moral Tale: Children’s Fiction and American Culture, 1820-1860. Hamden: Shoe String Press-Archon, 1975.

Taketani, Etsuko. “The ‘omnipresent aunt’ and the social child: Lydia Maria Child’s juvenile miscellany.” Children’s Literature 27 (1999): 22-39.

Yankee Doodle’s Literary Sampler of Prose, Poetry, and Pictures, Being an Anthology of Diverse Works Published for the Edification and Entertainment of Young Readers in America Before 1900. Selected from the Rare Book Collections of the Library of Congress and Introduced by Virginia Hamilton and Margaret N. Coughlan. NY: Crowell, 1974.