Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 1 of 1
Full-Text Articles in History
Raising Freedom's Child: Black Children And Visions Of The Future After Slavery, Mary Niall Mitchell
Raising Freedom's Child: Black Children And Visions Of The Future After Slavery, Mary Niall Mitchell
Mary Niall Mitchell
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 …