Beginning in 1611, the American story was forged by thousands of children “spirited away” across the Atlantic. Drawing from decades of archival research and the author’s own genealogy, STOLEN CHILDREN traces the transformation of exploitation into institution—from the fragile beginnings of indentured servitude to the rigid brutality of chattel slavery.
In 1611, ten-year-old Cecily is snatched from her London home and forced aboard the Swan as stolen cargo. Indentured to the Pierce family in Jamestown and trusting no one, she has only one goal: survival. She learns to read by observing the Pierce child, grasping knowledge as her sole possession. Yet a secret friendship with Matoaka, known to history as Pocahontas, upends all she has been taught. Matoaka’s self-determination, even while held hostage, inspires Cecily to seek control of her own fate. She carries that resolve into a forced marriage at fifteen. But when Cecily is left a widowed teenage mother, alone in the wilderness, she must learn to trust others to save herself and her child.
In 1754, Amina’s tenth birthday ends not with celebration, but with capture. Burdened by remorse for leading her captor to her cousin Nala, she survives a harrowing journey on the Hare—along the African coast, across to Barbados, then on to Charleston—by focusing on Nala. Auctioned in a “refuse parcel” to the Pierce rice plantation, the Pierces strip her of her cousin and even her identity, renaming her Cordelia. Missus Pierce, with cruel irony, renames and treats the enslaved as players in her own Shakespearean dramas, while forbidding literacy. Delia, as she is now called, seeks meaning in life by caring for others, yet when she discovers an opportunity to learn to read, she finally desires something for herself. As she forges bonds of literacy and love with the young blacksmith, Delia must decide if freedom of mind, if not body, is worth the risk of the overseer’s lash—or her life.
Both girls are bound by the legacy of the Pierce family. In a haunting intersection, a young Cecily encounters Angelo—one of the first Africans in English America—and senses that the very nation offering her autonomy is already constructing the cage that will hold Delia fast a century later.
The saga continues…
Stolen Children is the first book in the History with a Southern Accent series. The second book, Stolen Lives, at 89,000 words, continues the dual-timeline stories of Stolen Children. It includes the drama of the 1622 attacks that nearly destroyed Virginia, the connections to Shakespeare’s Tempest in both timelines, and the machinations of Missus Pierce as owner of Caliban and both owner and grandmother to Prospero.
The third book of the History with a Southern Accent series follows Kathryn, another stolen child, during Bacon’s Rebellion.
The fourth book brings all the families together and takes place during the American Revolution, exploring the paradox of a nation fighting for “liberty” while further entrenching the institution of slavery.
As a Nashville native and archival researcher, I spent decades unearthing the records that form the backbone of this series. The characters in Stolen Children are not mere archetypes; they are drawn from the real figures—both English and African—who were lost to the margins of history.
Notes:
When ten-year-old Cecily was snatched from her London home, she did not consider herself kidnapped, nor did the other children sent to the Virginia colony as bound labor in the early 1600s. Language can shape perception. The word kidnap was coined sixty years after Cecily was taken, defining the act as stealing children to provide servants and laborers for the American colonies. Before the term existed, society lacked the language to consider these actions illegal, which facilitated their acceptance. This normalization of child trafficking to English America laid the groundwork for the broader trade in stolen children—and adults—that began in 1619, eight years after Cecily’s arrival, and continued to and beyond Amina being taken, over a century later.
Cecily may have been the first child kidnapped from England, but she was joined by another hundred in 1618, as described briefly in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Children
The Virginia colony was the first “recipient” of these stolen children, followed by other American colonies. The trafficking of English children to America declined with the increase in stolen Africans and ended with the American Revolution. However, “unaccompanied child migration” as a British policy lasted centuries, ending only 50 years ago. The trade to America was followed by shipments to Canada, South Africa, the Caribbean, Australia, and New Zealand.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14733285.2021.1992348#abstract
The trafficking of millions of humans from the African continent was far more extensive and devastating. Those atrocities began by 1444, when Portuguese ships took captured Africans to the island of Madeira to grow sugar cane. In 1526, Portuguese mariners took enslaved Africans to Brazil, establishing the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
While held shackled on the Hare, Delia learns that most of the slave ships went to the Caribbean or further south. From 1501 to 1830:
388,000 captured and enslaved Africans were shipped to North America,
4,000,000 of the same were sent to the Caribbean (mostly Cuba and Haiti), and
5,000,000 were sent to Brazil.[i]
In 1830, there were estimated to be 2.3 million Black people in North America, and 2.4 million Black people in the Caribbean. The North American population had increased to about 600 percent of those sent, while the Caribbean population was reduced to only 60 percent of those sent. The survival and reproductive success rates were approximately 10 times higher in North America than in the Caribbean.
