Changing perceptions of childhood explored in book on children and law

“If any man have a stubborne and rebellious sonne of sufficient years and understanding, viz. sixteen yeares of age, which will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother … such a sonne shall be put to death.”

So says The Code of 1650, a compilation of early Connecticut laws. Historian Nancy Steenburg says it is unsettling to find that stubbornness in a 16-year-old was a capital crime, but it is also notable that, in looking through thousands of court cases, she never found any in which a rebellious son was put to death.

That the statutes on the books did not reflect what was happening in the court cases was one of the major themes of Steenburg’s research into Connecticut’s legal history with regard to minors. Her findings appear in a new book called Children and the Criminal Law in Connecticut, 1635-1855: Changing Perceptions of Childhood.

While other researchers have drawn conclusions from looking at Connecticut statutes, Steenburg brings to light new information by closely analyzing hundreds of court cases involving minors. The result is a more detailed, more nuanced interpretation of the legal treatment of children who were accused of theft, arson, murder, and breach of public order, and who were victims of physical and sexual abuse.

One of Steenburg’s main goals with the work is to debunk the popularly held notion that children in colonial times were treated as “little adults” after the age of seven. It’s an impression conveyed by portraiture of the seventeenth century, in which children under the age of seven are seen in shifts, with long hair. Children older than seven are portrayed as little men and little women in miniature adult clothing.

In her introduction to the book, Steenburg notes that while the modern “cult of the child” began with the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the mid-1700s, allowances were made for children’s special status 100 years earlier.

“I found cases going back to the 1600s where there was differential treatment for children; there was a recognition that you couldn’t treat a child, even over the age of seven, the same way you could treat an adult,” says Steenburg. “The book is an attempt to try to prove that there were different assumptions about children’s legal understanding, and therefore children were held to different standards of behavior.”

Steenburg further argues that understanding how a society treats its least powerful members is crucial to understanding that society as a whole. For example, she traces the gradual evolution of what became the nature-nurture debate.

“Connecticut was Puritan, and in the 1600s, the thinking was that children were evil – everyone was evil – and totally soaked with original sin,” she says. “By the 1700s, there’s a softening of that. I theorize in the book that it’s partly the influence of the Enlightenment.”

Moving toward the 19th century, the pervasive belief was that children who did not receive the proper moral upbringing could not be held responsible for their actions.

Steenburg’s book also discusses the specifics of how children were punished. Although children often received different or lesser punishments than adults committing the same kinds of crimes, up until 1828 the only prison in the state was Newgate, where children were imprisoned with adult criminals. In the early 1800s, the public began to believe that this situation was untenable, despite the need to punish children for their crimes.