Slavery in American Children's Literature, 1790-2010

Chapter 3. Reconstructing Slavery, 1865–1919

91 Chapter 3 Reconstructing Slavery 1865-1919 “I won’er what you kinky-­ head niggers is fur[,” said Mammy. . . .] And, picking up a cotton-­ stalk, she gave each of the little darkies a sound whipping. —Louise-­Clarke Pyrnelle, Diddie, Dumps and Tot, or, Plantation Child-­ Life (1882) Black is no mark of reproach to people who do not worship white. —Edward A. Johnson, A School History of the Negro Race in America (1890) Following the Civil War, three new amendments to the Constitution seemed to promise much: the Thirteenth abolished slavery; the Fourteenth guaranteed citizenship and equal protection under the law; the Fifteenth provided the right to vote (to black males). Despite the goals of postwar Reconstruction—what W. E. B. Du Bois had called “one of the most singular [. . .] attempts [. . .] to grapple with vast problems of race” (Souls 55)—in little over a decade, the Freedmen’s Bureau and concurrent legal moves toward civil rights collapsed amid an array of challenges, and Reconstruction formally ended in 1877. While white resistance to black enfranchisement underwrote the creation of the Ku Klux Klan in 1866 and the rising number of lynchings throughout the South, following Reconstruction , Southern states also engineered a legal backlash against freedmen in a series of Jim Crow laws which, for all practical purposes, nullified earlier-­ passed amendments. The U.S. Supreme Court also upheld segregationist policies, declaring the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional and, in the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) case, affirming the constitutionality of “separate but equal” in a decision that Chapter Three 92 would protect racial segregationist policies into the mid-­ twentieth century. The dangers of emancipation had been long argued; in 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville had prophesized race warfare and “perhaps [. . .] the extirpation of one or the other of the two races” as its probable outcome (245). It was not only the emancipation of over four million slaves that riddled the white imagination; it was what those slaves— particularly because of their color—had come to mean. Because slavery and race were combined in the American imagination, legal emancipation was not sufficient to counter the weight of centuries of race theories that had argued the inferiority of blacks. Indeed, as historian George Fredrickson has argued, this “conjunction of servitude and color [. . .] had planted the seeds of disaster by creating a problem of race more fundamental and difficult to solve than the problem of slavery” (23). Hence, emancipation legally freed the slave in a way it could not free the black man, woman, and child in America. Children’s literature from the end of the Civil War through the turn of the century reveals the ways in which the first generations of authors living in postslavery America re-­ presented slavery as a way of explaining the past, interpreting the present, and reimagining the nation’s racialized future. As such, this literature—including freedmen’s schoolbooks, postplantation novels, and antislavery responses —encompasses a range of ideological perspectives. Articulating the South’s cult of the Lost Cause, postplantation novels became a popular staple of the time, assuring white readers of the Confederacy’s nobility. Antislavery literature contested such depictions to varying degrees, at times offering images of heroic slaves rebelling against enslavement, at other times presenting depictions of faithful slaves, albeit with Union loyalties. In the midst of such literary contestations, new audiences were engaged, as more literature was written specifically for African American children, particularly bureau-­ sponsored schoolbooks early in the period and African American–authored books later in the century. While both often presented biographies of actual people in their depictions of slavery, each worked in different ways to define the expected roles of African Americans in a postslavery United States. Freedmen Education and Schoolbooks In 1865, the federal government established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, better known as the Freedmen’s 93 Reconstructing Slavery, 1865–1919 Bureau. Charged with supporting the civil rights of newly freed slaves, the bureau sought to develop fair labor practices, protect legal rights, and establish schools. Its limited effectiveness in setting up those schools revealed the problems and possibilities of education for freed blacks during the postbellum years. Despite suffering a lack of funds, the Freedmen’s Bureau coordinated the efforts and resources of Northern reformers and freedpeople who supplied both funding and teachers for the schools. The results were impressive . Between 1865 and 1870 as many as four thousand schools opened for...