Raising Freedom's Child: Black Children and Visions of the Future after Slavery (review)

Mary Niall Mitchell's Raising Freedom's Child joins the corpus of literature on Reconstruction and the rapidly growing field of childhood studies. But more than this, her study captures a moment in time when Americans—black and white—churned over the future direction of their country and the role that race should play in its formation. Examining these questions from the unique perspective of children's life experiences, Mitchell convincingly argues "the problem of freedom . . . was how to reconcile the conflicting visions of the future that slave emancipation inspired." In this, she writes, "the black child became both muse and metaphor" (p. 5).

Focusing primarily, but in no way exclusively, on Louisiana, Mitchell sets out to deconstruct the racial ideologies that remained unabated—indeed grew—in the aftermath of the Civil War. Beginning her discussion with the increasing racial oppression of the 1850s, Mitchell illustrates the "push back" exhibited by concerned teachers and parents who encouraged children to migrate from the turbulent United States. The rich letters of students at the Catholic Institution or Catholic Society for the Education of Indigent Orphans (Société Catholique pour l'instruction des orphelins dans l'indigence) provides insight into the shaping and developing of the worldview of newly freed children. Using primary sources such as the Freedmen's Bureau records, extant photographs, and cartes de visites, Mitchell adroitly argues that the future of African Americans really hinged on the future of black children. For example, in the second chapter, "Reading Race: Rosebloom and Pure White, Or So It Seemed," she grapples with the duplicitous meanings behind photographs of children, especially light-skinned slave girls. Used primarily by abolitionists to elicit sympathy for the causes of the newly freed, these photographs were simultaneously provocative and sensational. At a time when photography was employed in the service of racial denigration, Mitchell illustrates how images of young girls who appeared to be white were also used to unsettle notions of racial fixity, raise the fears that white people could somehow be enslaved, and stir the passions of northern audiences.

Subsequent chapters on "civilizing missions," labor, and education also reveal some of Mitchell's best scholarship, particularly her treatment of the ways in which abolitionists, missionaries, and reformers were engaged in the "larger civilizing movement" that began long before the Civil War (p. 99). Incorporating references to post-emancipation activities throughout the African Diaspora—Cuba, Brazil, and Jamaica—offers a much-needed comparative perspective on black child labor.

For readers new to this area of research, Mitchell's consideration of freed black children's labor conflicts in Louisiana and their role in the South's labor system after Reconstruction is brilliantly informative. Again, mining rich historical sources, Mitchell provides a solid analysis of a child "apprenticeship" system that emerged on former Southern plantations to replace chattel slavery. Accordingly, she writes that "thousands of freedchildren . . . became caught in this tangle of emotional, economic, and bureaucratic demands" of child exploitation (p. 149). Necessarily, many freed black families engaged in custody battles over their children adding to the difficulties in trying to solidify and reunify families following emancipation. This discourse alone reveals one of many contributions by Mitchell to the literature on Reconstruction.

Although Raising Freedom's Child ends on a dispirited note, it is nonetheless reflective of the disposition of American society in and immediately after the Reconstruction era. Mitchell, however, is quick to explain that the struggle was not left unattended as she turns toward the agendas of activist like W. E. B. Du Bois, who wrote in his well-documented 1903 manifesto The Souls of Black Folk: "Surely there shall yet dawn some mighty morning to lift the Veil and set the prisoned free. Not for me,—I shall die in my bonds,—but for fresh young souls who have not known the night and waken to the morning; a morning when men ask of...