Child Readers, Child Writers, and the Politics of Freedom in the Civil War Era

Black and white children in the North and South were important actors in shaping conversations about freedom during the Civil War and Reconstruction. This paper explores how children participated in the politics of freedom through their practices of reading and writing. Books produced for children during the Civil War era addressed questions of freedom directly, with some works promoting the antislavery cause and others describing slavery as a social good. Adults, through children’s literature, expressed how they hoped children would participate in the process of freedom. Using children’s letters, amateur newspapers produced by children, and children’s diaries, as well as the instances when children’s words and reading practices appeared in the letters of adults, this paper considers how children constituted a specific reading and writing public that existed both in contrast to, and in concert with, adults’ wishes. Through their reading and writing, these children acted and imagined themselves as part of the process of fighting for and against freedom. I examine therefore the distinctions between what adults wished children to learn and the expressions of children themselves. Using American Missionary Association records and other materials relating to schools for freedpeople, I show how black adults, black children, and white activists all saw freedchildren’s reading and writing as especially vital to the elimination of slavery’s after-effects and to the establishment of black citizenship. This paper demonstrates how children’s writing and reading made them simultaneously actors in the struggle over freedom and an imagined future citizenry being trained through print culture.