Category: Decade

The Sugar Plums

The Sugar Plums

By William Lloyd Garrison

Annotations by Celia Hawley

Samuel Halpert. *Farm Interior*. Oil on canvas, 1924. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

No, no, pretty sugar-plums! stay where you are!
Though my grandmother sent you to me from so far!
You look very nice, you would taste very sweet,
And I love you right well, yet not one will I eat.

For the poor slaves have labored, far down in the south,
To make you so sweet, and so nice for my mouth!
But I want no slaves toiling for me in the sun,
Driven on with the whip, till the long day is done. [1]

Perhaps some poor slave-child that hoed up the ground,
Round the cane in whose rich juice your sweetness was found, [2]
Was flogged till his mother cried sadly to see,
And I’m sure I want nobody beaten for me.

Artist Unknown. *Sugar Cane Plantation, La*. Stereograph, c. 1920s. Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C.

Thus said little Fanny, and skipped off to play,
Leaving all her nice sugar-plums just where they lay;
As merry as if they had gone in her mouth,
And she had not cared for the slaves in the south. [3]

Garrison, William Lloyed. “The Sugar Plums,” IN Juvenile Poems: For the use of free American children, of every complexion, 18. Boston: Garrison & knapp, 1835.

Contexts

Who Writes for Black Children?: African American Children’s Literature before 1900, Katharine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane, editors. The book references the Garrison’s Juvenile Poems and includes an excerpt by Garrison in its preface: “If … we desire to see our land delivered from the curse of prejudice and slavery, we must direct our efforts chiefly to the rising generation, whose minds are untainted, whose opinions unfashioned, and whose sympathies are true to nature in its purity.” The editors observe that Juvenile Poems is probably the first American book title that is consciously worded to include all children, regardless of race.

Free Produce Movement: This movement was about boycotting goods produced by slaves in Britain and America, and featured Quakers at its forefront.

Resources for Further Study

Enterprising Youth: Social Values and Acculturation by Monika Elbert includes Lesley Ginsberg’s essay referencing Garrison’s Juvenile Poems.
How Sugar Changed the World by Heather Whipps
Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History by Sidney Mintz
Smithsonian American Art Museum’s page on Samuel Halpert

Contemporary Connections

PBS Interview: Before cotton, sugar established America’s reliance on slave labor

[1] “Sugar slavery was the key component in what historians call The Trade Triangle, a network whereby slaves were sent to work on New World plantations, the product of their labor was sent to a European capital to be sold and other goods were brought to Africa to purchase more slaves.” Heather Whipps; see resources below.

[2] About sugar cane: “White Gold, as British colonists called it, was the engine of the slave trade that brought millions of Africans to the Americas beginning in the early 16th-century.” Heather Whipps

[3] “The ‘free produce’ movement was a boycott of any goods produced with slave labour. It was seen as a way of fighting slavery by having consumers buy only produce from non-slave labour. The movement was active in North America from the beginning of the abolitionist movement of the 1790s to the end of slavery in the 1860s.” Heather Whipps

1870s Poem

Prairie Fires

By Eudora May Stone, age 13

ANNOTATIONS BY KAREN L. KILCUP

The autumn frost begins to blight,
But here and there late blossoms linger:
The maple leaves are glowing bright,
Red-painted all by Autumn’s finger.

The birds are gone; the chill wind grieves[1]
Among the dry and withered grasses,
And showers of gold or scarlet leaves
It flings from every tree it passes.[2]

But, see, a spark has fallen there
Among the grasses of the prairie;
And high and higher in the air
The flames are leaping light and airy.

Now, farmers, guard your hoarded grain;
The flames are wider, fiercer growing,
And urging on the fiery train,
The raging wind is wildly blowing.

The sun sinks low, the waning light
Is fading fast from hills and meadows;
The night, so strangely, grandly bright,
Mantles the earth in fitful shadows.

Now fiercer still the wild winds blow –
The sky the fiery color catches;
And brighter yet the red flames glow,
And wide the blackened prairie stretches.

Illustration from the original text of “Prairie Fires.” Public domain.

St. Nicholas Magazine 1, no. 2 (September 1874): 629.

[1] Stone anthropomorphizes the wind, inviting readers to perceive it as having agency.

[2] The falling leaves add to the potential fuel of “the dry and withered grasses.”

Contexts

Prairie fires were common events in the nineteenth century, and they remain so today. According to History Nebraska, “The first settlers of Nebraska found a vast expanse of bluestem, which could be highly flammable. The danger was greatest during the late autumn of a dry season before the winter’s snows or after the snow melted during a dry spring. Smoke indicating a prairie fire was sometimes visible for days, and the horizon correspondingly illuminated at night. Fires sometimes originated as far away as Dakota Territory.”

The same source observes that fires were used as weapons against Native Americans. The U.S. Army set one historically large blaze in 1865 that consumed much of Nebraska and the Great Plains, as the federal government attempted to “drive Indians out of the Platte Valley.” Eudora Stone’s family members would likely have told her stories about this fire, which would have occurred around the time she was born.

In “Forces of Nature,” the Kansas Historical Society emphasizes how prairie fires are a natural part of the area’s ecosystem, but white settlers moving into the region did not understand fires as the Native Americans did: “American Indians had burned off sections of prairie for centuries. They realized that fire promoted the growth of new grass attractive to buffalo. But many farmers new to the Plains thought trees, not grasses, were a sign of the land’s richness. They believed prairie fires had created the Great American Desert by preventing trees from growing. Burning the prairie was considered uncivilized, and it threatened the houses, barns, and livestock settlers had worked so hard to acquire.”

Today, we consider controlled burns as essential to ecosystem health.

Resources for Further Study

Julie Courtright, Prairie Fire: A Great Plains History (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2011).
Christopher I. Roos et al., “Indigenous Impacts on Great Plains Fire Regimes of the Past Milennium,” PNAS: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, August 7, 2018.
Donald E. Westover, “Prairie Fires and the Nebraska Pioneer,” Digital Commons @ University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 1978.
“Fire and Grazing in the Prairie: Tallgrass Prairie,” National Park Service, n.d.

Pedagogy

A number of midwestern teachers have developed lesson plans that teach children about prairie fires’ history and current significance; examples appear below.

Laurel Smith and Dawn Hagan, “Fires on the Prairie” aims at younger children.
“Prairie Fire,” North Dakota Studies, State Historical Society of North Dakota

Contemporary Connections

Writing for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in “Prairie Fires on the Southern Plains,” Deke Arndt writes about the fires that devastated large sections of the southern plains in 2016.

1840s Poem

The Old Owl

The Old Owl

By Samuel Griswold Goodrich

Annotations by Karen L. Kilcup

Detail of “Great Horned Owl” by Louis Agassiz Fuertes. In *Birds of America* by T. Gilbert Pearson, 1923, Plate 5.

                    I.

The owl is a bird that flaps along
    With a lonely loud halloo;
He has but one unceasing song, 
                 To whit, to whit, to woo: 
In dusky light he takes his flight,
The twilight dim is the time for him,
          And when the midnight scowls,--
         'Tis then he silently prowls,
          And hunts the mice and moles.

                    II.

A lonely owl once built her nest
    In the hole of a hollow tree, 
And she with a fine young brood was blest
    As ever owl could be.
She loved her young, and as they clung
    Beneath her downy wing,
She o'er them oft, on a branch aloft,
    As they reposed below,
Would shout and sing, while the woods would ring, 
                     To whit, to whit, to woo:

                    III.

A boy came by that hollow tree,
    With a fierce and wild halloo;
And this the birds, all startled heard,
    And answered, to whit, to woo.
As the old bird shrieked, the young ones squeaked;
        "Oh ho!" said the boy,
        In a frantic joy, 
"An owl is the bird for me,
And here are its young ones three."
    The with eager look,
    He that bird's nest took;
        While plaintive and low,
        Rose a note of wo
From the owl in its hollow tree. [1] 
                     To whit, to whit, to woo:

Owl Family around Nest — Original image heading “The Old Owl”

                    IV.

That boy now took his victims home,
    And put them in a cage;
         And cooped up there,
          In their despair,
    They bit and scratched in rage;
They caught his fingers once or twice,
    And made him scream with pain;
          And then he vowed,
          In curses loud,
    That they should all be slain.
He tied them to a stake, and got
An iron pin, and made it hot,
    To burn out their young eyes.
"Ha, ha!" said he, "you'll not bite me,
    You'll not bite me again:"
          Then in the sky
          A wing flapped by
    That seemed to stop his breath;
'Twas the old owl, with a heavy scowl,
Lamenting her young ones' death--
                     To whit, to whit, to woo:

                    V.

That boy grew up--became a man,
    A cruel man was he,
His heart had grown as hard as stone,
    Which none but God could see.
        One dreary night,
        In the wan moonlight,
    Beneath that hollow tree
He vengeful stood, to spill the blood
    Of a hated enemy.
With a furious blow, he laid him low,
    Then plunged his knife
    To take his life,
        Deep to its haft,
        And wildly laughed,--
"You will not again plague me."
    But yet as he knelt
    O'er that foe, he felt
A shudder that quailed all his blood's full glow;
    For oh, he heard,
    On the tree that bird,
The same old owl, o'er that murder foul,
                    Cry, whit, to whit, to woo.

                    VI.

He fled--the owl's reproaching cry
    Still ringing in his ears;
But ah, 'twas vain for the wretch to fly,
    So loaded with guilt and fears.
        He quick was caught,
        And to justice brought,
    And soon in prison lies.
        And oh, while there,
        In his deep despair,
    In lonely tears and sighs,
He thought of the iron cage!
And he thought of the cruel rage!!
And the red-hot pin, that he once thrust in,
    To burn out the young bird's eyes.

Condemned to die--'twas his destiny
    To die on that hollow tree,
        And there as he hung,
        And there as he swung
    In the night-wind to and fro,
        That vengeful bird
        Was often heard,
When scarcely a breath the forest stirred,
        In screamings high,
        All the night to cry,
                    To whit, to whit, to woo.
                    To whit, to whit, to woo.

SAMUEL GRISWOLD GOODRICH, “THE OLD OWL,” ROBERT MERRY’S MUSEUM 5, NO. 3 (MARCH 1843): 83-84.

[1] The image of the owl that accompanies this poem suggests that the author imagines a Great Horned Owl. These owls typically nest in “trees such as cottonwood, juniper, beech, pine, and others.” (All About Birds)

“Mottled Owl.” From *Nest and Eggs of Birds of the United States,*
*Illustrated* by Thomas G. Gentry, 1882, Plate XXXIII.

Contexts

This poem—and many texts like it—express the common nineteenth-century belief that boys were more likely than girls to engage in acts of animal cruelty. “The Old Owl” also mirrors the continuing belief that (as Brigitte Fielder comments), “animal cruelty . . . might easily slip into violence toward humans” (493). When this poem was published, neither the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) nor the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the earliest U.S.-based animal- and child-protection organizations, had yet been founded. Coalescing in 1866 and 1875 respectively, many activists worked on establishing both organizations. Known as “The Great Meddler,” New Yorker Henry Bergh was inspired to found the ASPCA after he witnessed a carriage driver beating a horse that had fallen in the street. Bergh modeled the organization after the UK’s Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which was founded in 1840. Among his actions was creating a “Declaration of the Rights of Animals” that he modeled on the United States Declaration of Independence.

Resources for Further Study

“All About Birds.” The Cornell Lab.

Fielder, Brigitte. “Animal Humanism: Race, Species, and Affective Kinship in Nineteenth-Century Abolitionism.” American Quarterly 65, no. 3 (September 2013): 457-514.

“History.” The New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

“History of the ASPCA.” ASPCA.

Kilcup, Karen L. Stronger, Truer, Bolder: American Children’s Writing, Nature, and the Environment. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2021. Chapter two discusses the poem; chapter three briefly discusses the interlocking history of animal welfare and child welfare movements.

Pedagogy

Claudia Khourey-Bowers at Kent State University has an extensive website focusing on teaching methods on Animal Rights and Welfare. This site is hosted by Teach the Earth, a site managed by the National Association of Geoscience Teachers.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s website, allaboutbirds.org, has among the best resources for teaching and learning about birds, with information on habitat, migration, feeding, life history, and sounds. It has a dedicated page for K-12 education on Teaching Bird ID.

The National Humane Education Society has a site devoted to Animal Welfare . . . in Schools! This site has numerous links to materials for teachers. The NHES offers free “Kindness in the Classroom” humane education presentations to schools for K-5 grades.

PETA sponsors TeachKind, led by “former classroom teachers, here to help schools, educators, and parents promote compassion for animals through free lessons, virtual classroom presentations, materials, advice, online resources, and more.”

Contemporary Connections

“The Old Owl” depicts cruelty in terms that most readers today will find shockingly explicit. PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) uses some graphic images on its website to convey many instances of animal cruelty. It investigates such issues as factory farming and the use of animals in medical experiments. The organization has formed an activist movement for people 24 or younger, Students Opposing Speciesism.