Raising Freedom's Child: Black Children and Visions of the Future After Slavery

American History and Culture Series

by Mary Niall Mitchell

The end of slavery in the United States inspired conflicting visions of the future for all Americans in the nineteenth century, black and white, slave and free. The black child became a figure upon which people projected their hopes and fears about slavery's abolition. As a member of the first generation of African Americans raised in freedom, the black child--freedom's child--offered up the possibility that blacks might soon enjoy the same privileges as whites: landownership, equality, autonomy. Yet for most white southerners, this vision was unwelcome, even frightening. Many northerners, too, expressed doubts about the consequences of abolition for the nation and its identity as a white republic.
From the 1850s and the Civil War to emancipation and the official end of Reconstruction in 1877, Raising Freedom's Child examines slave emancipation and opposition to it as a far-reaching, national event with profound social, political, and cultural consequences. Mary Niall Mitchell analyzes multiple views of the black child--in letters, photographs, newspapers, novels, and court cases--to demonstrate how Americans contested and defended slavery and its abolition.
With each chapter, Mitchell narrates an episode in the lives of freedom's children, from debates over their education and labor to the future of racial classification and American citizenship.Raising Freedom's Child illustrates how intensely the image of the black child captured the imaginations of many Americans during the upheavals of the Civil War era. Through public struggles over the black child, Mitchell argues, Americans by turns challenged and reinforced the racial inequality fostered under slavery in the United States. Only with the triumph of segregation in public schools in 1877 did the black child lose her central role in the national debate over civil rights, a role she would not play again until the 1950s.

336 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Kidada · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mitchell's book illuminates the disputes waged over access to, control of, and the right to shape the destinies of freedchildren after the Civil War. In placing children at the center of "the problem(s) of freedom," by analyzing visual representations as well as policy debates over labor, education, and socialization, the author opens a window on the political contests of what became of freedchildren. The standard narrative of emancipation focuses on what freedparents wanted for their children and some of the battles they waged with the former slaveholding apparatus to assert control over them and their futures. Mitchell's book throws important light on how other actors, namely white northern and southern civilians and authorities, viewed these children and how they tried to shape freedchildren's destinies to satisfy their own agendas of what black freedom should mean. Stitched into this dominate narrative of white Americans visions of freedchildren are African Americans' strategic efforts to control their children's fates. In all, it is a fascinating analysis of "pull and tug" by adults over the freedom of formerly enslaved children.

[Valerie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though "Raising Freedom's Child" might not present any groundbreaking points about race relations in the US, her creative use of source material and her focus on children offers an interesting perspective on children during the late 1800s. I consider this book to be a useful addition to the growing field of children's history, and it also serves as an example of the strength of interdisciplinary research. Gender, age, class, and race all come together as Mitchell retells the story of the first generation of children living during Emancipation. All in all, Mitchell writes a great narrative, which makes the book entertaining (if you're into the subject matter, I suppose) as well as informative.