Intimate Reconstructions: Children in Postemancipation Virginia by Catherine A. Jones (review)

In the September 2015 issue of Civil War History, the journal’s editors took the unusual step of hosting a scholarly forum on Reconstruction. This was their way of addressing the dearth of articles about Reconstruction history that had come across their desks in the last five years. This silence seemed odd and unsettling, for, as the editors asserted, the field of Reconstruction history has grown and diversified considerably in the last decade and a half, warranting the attention of all scholars of nineteenth-century America. Catherine Jones’s book, Intimate Reconstructions: Children in Postemancipation Virginia, is a good example of the scholarship that they are talking about. This is creative and substantive work that will expand our conventional understanding of the Reconstruction process in important ways.

With her focus fixed on one former Confederate state and its youngest, most vulnerable population, Jones is able to probe deeply into the spaces children occupied. In addition to the intimate family-centered households where one might expect to find such dependents, she follows her subjects into their contested workplaces, dangerous street environments, poor houses, orphanages, and public schools. There she examines not only how young Virginians were affected by wartime dislocation, emancipation, Confederate defeat, and reconstruction policy, but also how these children sought to control and improve their situation, and how adults argued over and used children, real and imagined, to articulate their own vision for how Virginia communities should move forward. By peering through the prism of childhood, Jones sees a substantial blurring and shifting of the boundary between private and public. She finds tremendous disruptions—both productive and unproductive—to the lives of Virginians, black and white, old and young, but she also observes that the practices of slavery had a powerful legacy in the post-emancipation years, as adults took differing positions about who had authority over children. What did it mean to be a child, a parent, a family? Emerging from an entrenched system of slavery, there were no clear answers.

For this research, Jones has tapped a wide range of primary sources. Family letters, diaries, private business papers, and employer contracts are useful here, but so are newspapers, political speeches, Freedman’s Bureau records, the views of northern missionaries, and the reports of institutions concerned with the state’s most unprotected and uncontrolled children. Admittedly, her sources say more about children from former slave and slaveholding groups than other demographics, but for the most part, she has made wise use of what sources remain available from this period. With the author’s careful analysis, these documents yield rich insights into the contested process of postwar reconstruction for all Virginians. From them, Jones argues that children were at the center of postwar struggles. That assertion might seem questionable if one thinks primarily about the processes central to “capital R” Reconstruction: state constitution writing, the political reintegration of seceded states into the union, etc. But Jones calls our attention to the “varied reconstructions”—the “small r” experiences that in one way or another touched every citizen, shaped every household, and informed many important conversations, both public and private, about life after emancipation (189). It is there that she sees children and adults’ concerns about children serving a vital role.

For this initially skeptical reviewer, Jones’s interpretation is mostly convincing. While all six of her chapters were informative and interesting, the last three were particularly thought provoking and inventive, especially in their exploration of public children and the evolving discussions about the state’s responsibility for their welfare and their future. A more robust historiographical treatment of children during Reconstruction would have made this strong book even better. Jones nods to Mary Niall Mitchell’s Raising Freedom’s Child and Wilma King’s Stolen Childhood in the introduction. All three of these scholars address the apprenticeship system in their work, but it is not clear where their methods and findings diverge. It would have helped to have a...