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

This book is a welcome addition to the long-neglected history of children and families after the American Civil War. Catherine Jones contends that focusing on children “highlights the challenge liberal Reconstruction policy faced in redefining the boundary between public and private life that households—the defining social and political units of the slave South—had long blurred” (9). Her exhaustive examination of governmental, institutional, and private records suggests that the public and private responses to the needs of children in mid-nineteenth-century Virginia were uneven at best and shameful at worst. Much to her credit, Jones is mindful of the limitations of available primary sources, recognizing that historians must rely mostly on secondary accounts of the tumultuous circumstances of white and African American children. As such, Jones does a masterful job of recapturing the lives of children whose voices have been lost and forgotten.

Jones’s first chapter highlights the physical and economic hardships encountered by children and families in Virginia during the Civil War. Both white and enslaved children confronted malnutrition, disease, and insecurity, which disrupted and redefined familial roles and relationships. After the war, the federal government intervened—albeit in an insufficient and inconsistent way—through the Freedmen’s Bureau to furnish material necessities and secure the rights of citizens. Yet federal officials also recognized that most of the needs of children would be met privately as African American and white slaveholding families began the process of reorganizing household relationships to adapt to a future without slavery.

Freedmen’s Bureau officials believed that preserving and strengthening kinship, as well as championing the domestic ideal of male-headed households, would provide freed children the support necessary to cope with postwar changes in the South. Their efforts, however, often conflicted with their desire to preserve individual consent, rights, voluntary contracts, and other liberal ideals. Defiant former slave masters and ambivalent bureau agents occasionally interfered with the reconstitution of freedpeople’s households. Similarly, the Freedmen’s Bureau was called upon to intervene when prejudicial labor contracts between young freedpeople and former masters undercut kinship and domestic ideals.

Emancipation and Confederate defeat altered the domestic order of former slaveholding families in several ways: it jeopardized systems of labor organization, advanced political exclusion, and reenergized theories of natural hierarchies that had formed the foundation of southern domesticity before the Civil War. White households, including extended families and broader networks of kin, turned to familial relationships to adapt to instability produced by emancipation. Absent children intensified labor shortages and reshaped parents’ worldviews, while their presence and fulfillment of duties to their parents did little to moderate the emotional strain or curb the financial decline of white households during Reconstruction.

According to the author, when the private institutions of kinship and voluntary labor arrangements failed, a public problem emerged. Adults disagreed about how to respond to the needs of orphans and impoverished children, particularly in cities such as Richmond and Norfolk. Virginians both sentimentalized and criminalized public children based on their race. White orphans earned their sympathy, while black orphans prompted their suspicion.

Apprenticeship emerged as the preferred way to deal with the problem of orphaned children, particularly black children. Ideally, apprenticeship replicated familial relationships, populated the labor force, and minimized the burden on public institutions. But, in practice, it abridged children’s freedom, facilitated labor exploitation, and undermined freedpeople’s efforts to reconstitute families. Although capricious and sometimes at odds with its liberal vision of Reconstruction, the Freedmen’s Bureau embraced apprenticeship as a way to advance the transition from slavery to free labor.

Jones’s examination of the Female Humane Association and the Male Orphan Asylum in Richmond reveals small-scale efforts to memorialize the Confederacy and naturalize racial segregation by depicting white indigents as children orphaned by the war. While the perpetuation of Confederate identity was a project of great import to supporters of those values, labor continued to organize the lives of orphaned white children, who...