Children sustained and embodied the institution of slavery, especially after the formal end of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808. By 1860, there were nearly four million enslaved people, 57 percent of whom were under the age of twenty. In a harrowing description of the conditions some slave children lived in, Francis Fedric, who was born enslaved in Virginia and escaped in his forties, wrote in his autobiography, “Children feed like pigs out of troughs, and being supplied sparingly, invariably fight and quarrel with one another over their meals.” Children under ten were 51 percent of total
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