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.
