PURITAN NATION:

In 1825, Lydia Maria Francis was only 23 years old, but she had already written two novels that had made her a literary celebrity. She was fiercely proud of her country's new history and bright promise, and her protagonists exhibited all the virtues Americans confidently claimed. They were principled, independent, and unbiased. They were also fair, just, and honest. Her first novel, Hobomok, caused a small sensation. "I should think more highly of the talent of the woman who could write 'Hobomok,' " one admirer gushed, "than of any other American woman who has ever written." The second, The Rebels, was set in Revolutionary War Boston and included an imagined speech by the American patriot James Otis that was so rousing that schoolchildren began memorizing it and attributing it to Otis himself. These early successes catapulted Francis from her working-class origins as a baker's daughter into the glittering social circles of Boston's literary elite.

Soon it became clear that Francis had talent as a children's author as well. In 1824, she published Evenings in New England, a collection of stories, fables, and riddles for young readers. But Evenings was more than entertainment. It aimed to answer some critical questions. What kind of virtues did the new country need? What kind of stories should shape the character of its children? What, in short, should American children be like? Francis populated her book with both glorious heroes of the Revolution and simple, honest characters from Maine. Her stories guaranteed young readers that honesty, ingenuity, and integrity were their birthright, characteristic of every American from the local farmer to George Washington. The overall message was clear: American children should treasure the ideals of freedom and equality they had inherited and pass them on.

But if American children were to be schooled in basic lessons of fairness, honesty, and justice, some awkward facts needed explaining--namely, that Black humans were being enslaved and Native Americans were being removed. How to explain this to children who were also being told that their country was founded on freedom and equality? Maria Francis had always been direct and headstrong. By page three of Evenings in New England, she had named both issues. In subsequent chapters, she confronted them explicitly. [...]

The following year, Child met the fire-breathing abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and converted to abolitionism. To be an abolitionist in Boston in the 1830s was to be a radical. Politicians and religious leaders warned that such fanatics would destroy America's unity, undermine its religion, and wreck its economy. But given her new skepticism and armed with new facts, Child was undeterred. She had already dedicated her life to the question of what it meant to be an American. Now she was sure. It meant pledging every resource you had to compelling the United States to live up to its founding assertion that all humans were equal. Patriotism demanded that all Americans sacrifice what they had to achieve this goal.

Child quickly settled on what she had to offer the movement: her reputation as a popular novelist and children's author. Three years after her conversion to abolitionism, Child published a book assailing the evils of slavery. In her introduction to An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833), she anticipated her readers' outrage: "Reader, I beseech you not to throw down this volume as soon as you have glanced at the title." She was still, she reminded them, the trusted editor of The Juvenile Miscellany. "If I have the most trifling claims upon your good will, for an hour's amusement to yourself, or benefit to your children," she wrote, "read it for my sake." She offered her readers one more enticement. "Read it," she wrote, "from sheer curiosity to see what a woman (who had much better attend to her household concerns) will say upon such a subject."

What followed was a methodical denunciation of the history, politics, economics, and moral justification of slavery. Child carefully took apart the arguments she herself had once used to defend the institution while providing harrowing accounts of torture and mutilation--enslaved men trying to escape who were torn apart by dogs, enslaved mothers driven to insanity as their children were sold away. She laid responsibility for slavery at the feet of northerners whose prejudices and willingness to compromise with the South made them complicit in this wickedness. Where in all this, Child demanded to know, were the virtues Americans claimed as their birthright? Where was America's vaunted honesty if it shrouded its barbaric practices in patriotic platitudes? Where was its integrity if it egregiously betrayed its ideals? What kinds of citizens would the children of such a country, steeped in willful ignorance and self-serving dishonesty, become? The result, Child promised her readers, would be nothing less than the failure of democracy and the triumph of tyranny.

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