In “Playing with Fire: Baby Firebugs in Gilded Age America,” Prof. Wendy Gamber traces child arsonists in the late nineteenth century to explore how this particular crime intersected with gendered and racialized understandings of childhood. Why were children considered to be “playing with fire” even when this led to disastrous damage? Who was allowed to be playful like this and who wasn’t? And how the American judicial system deal wit these cases? The fascinating article was published in the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth in January 2025. Find it here.
Dear Wendy, your wonderful article discusses a handful of “baby firebugs”: child arsonists. Tell us about six-year-old Roy Gould. How did you first stumble upon his case?
First, thanks so much for your kind words. A big shoutout to my colleague Mike Grossberg and JHCY editor Holly N. S. White for helping me make sense of my baby firebugs. I’m working on a book on the history of household hazards and was researching the history of children playing with fire. I searched digitized newspapers for “playing with matches.” I got thousands of results, most of them incidents described as accidents. Roy Gould also popped up. West Coast newspapers described him as a kid who both played with matches and deliberately set buildings on fire. I love nineteenth-century language, and the term newspapers used for kids like Roy—“baby firebug”—hooked me.
What sources did you rely on to reconstruct Roy’s case? Are there any sources from Roy himself, perhaps even retrospectively?
Mainly newspapers—no court records have survived. I was devastated to discover that the page that would have included Roy’s mugshot had been removed from the Sacramento Police Department’s mug book. Maybe the department was embarrassed that it arrested a six-year-old; maybe someone took it as a souvenir. The California State Archives kindly shared Roy’s record from the Whitter State [reform]
School with me. He was sent there when he finally reached the minimum age for admission (eight), but for stealing, not arson. I also learned a fair amount about Roy’s family through city directories, manuscript censuses, and voter registration lists. I wish I had something from Roy himself. All I have are his supposed words, reported in the September 30, 1895, issue of the Sacramento Bee. The fire chief took Roy to the various scenes of his crimes and asked him to show how he set the various fires he was accused of igniting. At Campbell Brothers Livery Stable, Roy told the chief, “[T]here was a whole lot of hay here—loose hay, which burns fine. So I lighted a match, this way . . . and then went away and let her burn.” I have no idea how accurately the Bee recorded Roy’s words—or even if they made them up. But they ring true to me—this was a kid who loved to play with fire and one who was clueless about the consequences of fessing up to it.
You further discuss Johnny Hampton whose case played out quite differently than Roy’s, likely because of his race. We do not know how old Johnny was. Can you explain how guardians would have proven a child’s age to a court in the late nineteenth century? Why was the ability to prove age a marker of privilege?
Here I’ve relied on the insights of scholars such as Susan Pearson (The Birth Certificate) and Shane Landrum (“From Family Bibles to Birth Certificates,” in Corinne T. Field’s and Nicholas L. Syrett’s edited collection, Age in America), who trace the uneven evolution of public record keeping. Kentucky, where Johnny was born, didn’t consistently issue birth certificates until 1911. As both Pearson and Landrum show, nineteenth-century parents used family bibles, in which individual families recorded births and deaths, as proof of age. In fact, Roy Gould’s father brought a family bible to court with him on one occasion to prove his son was too young to be sentenced to reform school. Some courts accepted guardians’ sworn testimony, others, as Landrum shows in the case of antebellum North Carolina, did not. Due to poverty and/or limited literacy, Black families and many poor white families were less likely to possess family bibles or other written proofs of age. The evidence for Johnny Hampton, alas, is incomplete. I don’t know the basis on which the judge decided he was nine. Maybe his mother testified to that fact, maybe that’s what Johnny told the court. Maybe the Hamptons had a family bible after all. Those newspapers that said he was only five were likely wrong. It turns out that he probably was ten or eleven.
Three other axes you consider in your article are gender, class, and disability. You succinctly argue that her wealthy background and display of feminine sensibility likely allowed 12-year-old Hattie Thornton to escape legal punishment. Instead she was labelled a manic. Can you share more about the medical but also gendered and classed understanding of “mania” at this time. Was “mania” considered a danger to
the public?
This is one of many issues I need to gain a better understanding of. I’m not sure how seriously to take “mania.” In Hattie’s case it seemed to be a quick legal fix. There’s no evidence that she was admitted to a mental institution, which might have been the case for an adult pyromaniac. But I need to do more reading in the 19th-century medical literature as well as more recent medical scholarship. Interestingly, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual dropped pyromania from its second edition (1968) and reinserted it in later versions.
Lay the responsibility to prevent a child from turning into a “firebug” with the child’s parents or with institutions? What do Roy’s, Johnny’s, and Hattie’s cases tell us about the role of the law and reformatories in this period?
I’m struck by how little parent-blaming there seemed to be, though I think ideas about parental responsibility had become more prominent by the final years of the nineteenth century. In an era when even toddlers, especially boys, enjoyed substantial freedom from parental supervision (free-range parenting to the nth degree, I guess), parents expected kids to behave themselves. And historians have shown that it was sometimes parents, rather than police or prosecutors, who asked judges to send unruly children to reform school or other institutions. This was the case for Elmer Davis, the five-year-old “baby thief and firebug” of Marshalltown, Iowa. Even Roy Gould’s parents finally agreed he should be sent to the Whittier State School, after he was arrested for the third time. Of course, parents often objected when judges sentenced their child to various carceral institutions—reform schools, houses of refuge, convents, etc. As a colleague reminded me just the other day, supporters of these institutions had good intentions; reform schools, for instance, were supposed to be compassionate alternatives to prisons. Unfortunately, the realities of institutional life often failed to live up to the ideal.
A large theme of your article is “play.” Children played with fire. They delighted in fire. How can a lens of play from childhood studies help us better understand both legal systems and juvenile offenders?
I’m still figuring this out. But it seems that so many juvenile “crimes” happened during play. As historians like Howard Chudacoff and Crystal Lynn Webster (to name a few) have shown, adults and children had different ideas of what constituted proper play. Kids loved to do things adults told them not to—and here I want to do more thinking. It seems like a behavior that transcends place and time, but I also want to avoid presentism.
Your article centers the intersection of legal history and the history of childhood. In your experience, what are the insights but also limitations of this interdisciplinary approach?
I’m an amateur at both. Maybe I’ll have an answer in a few years.
You are currently working on a larger project on “baby criminals.” When did this category first emerge in American legal history? What drew you to them?
After I discovered baby firebugs, I was curious if there were other types of “baby” criminals. Turns out there were baby murderers, baby thieves, infant burglars, and baby pickpockets. All of these were journalistic creations, not legal categories. I’ve traced the earliest usage to the late 1860s, but these terms really take off in the 1880s and 1890s. So on one hand, they’re just reporters’ slang that caught on. And, of course, in an era of sensational journalism, this was a great way to sell newspapers. If you saw a headline about a “baby murderer” (which could mean either an adult who murdered a child or a child who killed a sibling or playmate), you’d probably read the article. On the other, these terms reflected journalists’, reformers’, and ordinary people’s attempts to differentiate between various stages of childhood. Sometimes newspapers used “baby,” and “boy” or “girl” interchangeably, but often “boy” and “girl” offenders were children in their teens, while “babies” tended to be younger. These classifications roughly followed legal norms—for instance, the common law presumed that children younger than seven could not distinguish right from wrong. But I think they also existed independently of the law. I’m hoping to do a more thorough job of tracing the evolution of various ways to describe juvenile offenders and of explaining the origins of a turn-of-the twentieth century moral panic about baby criminals. Still working on that!
To end on a personal note, we’d like to ask you about a few of your favorite things…
a. Favorite way of managing notes and/or citations?
I’ve failed at using citation managers like Zoltero and Endnote and I’m a failed Scrivener user. My current practice, which is working well for my baby criminals project, is to create a “case file” for each one I find. The file includes newspaper articles, my notes, and any other information I can find—census entries, reform school reports, court records, etc. I’ve also recorded basic information—age, year, race, gender, location, outcome—on Excel spreadsheets. It’s a handy way to keep track of them all. But generally, my research management method is best described as total chaos. I’m incorrigible just like the kids I write about.
b. Best book in the history of childhood and youth you’ve read in the past year?
That’s a hard one—there are so many great books on the topic. I love Crystal Lynn Webster’s Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood, especially her chapter on play. I greatly admire the late Eli Faber’s The Child in the Electric Chair. It’s a tough read because it’s so devastating, but I’m so impressed with the accessibility and clarity of Faber’s prose, his pacing, and his ability to place his subject in broader historical contexts. And while it’s not a history of childhood per se, I find myself returning again and again to the early chapters of Timothy Gilfoyle’s A Pickpocket’s Tale.
c. Favorite childhood book?
The books I read as a child were very retro—some had been my older sister’s. I loved The Poky Little Puppy. I still remember “roly-poly, pell-mell”—what a great description of movement! Oscar the Trained Seal on the Radio was another favorite—if I recall correctly Oscar was supposed to advertise ice cream but told everyone to eat raw fish instead. My family had an old copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which I also loved. It included beautifully detailed line drawings—so different and so much more satisfying than the Disney versions, even if a lot more violent.
d. Best piece of advice you remember receiving as a child?
I’m sure I got a lot of advice and I’m sure I ignored it.
e. And finally, do you remember ever playing with fire?
No, but my nephew set a vacant lot on fire when he was six (this would have been in the early 1970s). He got a lecture from the guys on the fire truck, and that was it. No jail time.
Wendy Gamber (she/her/hers) is the Robert F. Byrnes Professor in History at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author of The Female Economy: The Millinery and Dressmaking Trades, 1860-1930; The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America; and The Notorious Mrs. Clem: Murder and Money in the Gilded Age. She is currently at work on a history of household hazards in North America from the eighteenth century to the present and a study of late-nineteenth century “baby criminals.”
