Harper's Weekly, Jan 30, 1864 The Children Are Introduced

JPK Huson 1863

Brev. Brig. Gen'l
Joined
Feb 14, 2012
Location
Central Pennsylvania
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With apologies to 18th Virginia whose thread on the topic was excellent, came across the original, 1864 article inside the pages of Harper's Weekly on a story which shocked the nation. ' Uncle Tom's Cabin ' had primed those disposed to viewing slavery as barbaric towards viewing the practice with complete and utter horror. This story brought fresh converts and sealed its fate. Not ' only ' white children, enslaved. These children had fathers who knew the children lived as they did while he enjoyed opulence of a world far removed. It was shattering as a revelation- and incredibly effective.

The children and newly freed adults, all with horrific stories brought North with them were photographed, their stories widely spread. Our family has two of these photographs- in one, a child, Fannie Lawrence is laying her head in Catherine Lawrence's lap. Fannie was part of a different group, same genre, the light skinned enslaved child illustrating how children are all the same. It worked.

Harper's Weekly, January 30, 1864
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Thanks for sharing the stories and the photographs. I can only imagine how shocking seeing pictures of these 'white' slave children must have been for the general public during the era.

I had read journals and diaries of southern women detailing 'children as white as cotton' living in the slave quarters, and when I first saw those accounts a number of years ago, I wondered if they exaggerated their descriptions. Since the internet now provides such a storehouse of photographs that weren't widely available to everyone before, images of these slave children who really do match-up to the descriptions given by these southern ladies. One wonders how people in the era were able to turn the other way and allow children, who looked no different their own children, to remain in slavery.
 
This is one of JPK's sisters, as a child. Any family who had the means lovingly recorded their children in photos. It was an identifiable custom, by the 1860's.
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One huge reason this campaign to have enslaved white children recognized was launched, was because it was a step towards seeing the evil inherent in any child's enslavement, and a short step towards the comprehensive coin dropping, societally Photos showed white enslaved children, as a kind of shock/horror image of the era, like any photo, any family would have. Including these children in groups of enslaved, white and black was brilliant- children were children. People were people. Light was breaking.
 
Thank you for this posting, which confirmed my research about the treatment of non-slaveholders in the South by the slavers, and also the North's utter complacence, their support of slavery from afar by word and deed. Perhaps an underlying motive, they needed cotton in the North for those textile mills.
 
Yes, it's important to understand this as a somewhat cynical effort to build support for Freemen's support organizations in the North by highlighting the existence of "white" enslaved children, to whom observers might be more sympathetic to their plight, and so more willing to pitch in with financial support. But at the same time, these children remained enslaved in the South exactly because, no matter how "bright" they were, they weren't considered white.

* "Bright" being a contemporary term for a very light-skinned person of color.
 
Thanks for sharing these excerpts and photos. They are a vivid portrayal of the evils of the 'peculiar institution'.
 
No State permitted the enslavement of whites under it's laws. Interesting article though. This seems to be a pretty well known article.
 
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Needless to say I was personally intrigued when I first came across this subject in my studies! :smile:

I had just read Uncle Tom's Cabin and was discussing the book with a teacher friend of mine and when the subject of Eliza came up, my friend did not recall that Eliza was of mixed parentage. I politely insisted and my friend replied to me that if it was true, she would not have been a slave. Well, maybe I would need to reread the book again but I was pretty sure Eliza might (maybe) just have looked a little like me. (Her husband George was described as mulatto.) When I told her this, you could have heard a pin drop! :giggle:

I really do not have the words to express my feelings about these pictures of these beautiful children.

It's nice to know these prints still survive today.


https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/28/white-slave-children-of-n_n_1307127.html

and good ol Wikipedia

 
Fanny Kemble never published her account of South Carolina until her children were adults. But her private talks seriously undermined support for the Confederacy among the fashionable English people, for reasons similar to those cited by JPK.
 
Yes, it's important to understand this as a somewhat cynical effort to build support for Freemen's support organizations in the North by highlighting the existence of "white" enslaved children, to whom observers might be more sympathetic to their plight, and so more willing to pitch in with financial support. But at the same time, these children remained enslaved in the South exactly because, no matter how "bright" they were, they weren't considered white.

* "Bright" being a contemporary term for a very light-skinned person of color.


Right? It's such a shocking thought in 2018, that children would be required to be a certain color before the coin dropped, and it would take the thought of white children enslaved to get the point across. Originally came across the effort because Mom's ancestors left us several of those Cassopia Lawrence photos sold to raise money. Saving grace was the inclusion of black, newly freed children in publicity photos. Hopefully made it tougher to ignore the fact that children have no place in all the ugly out there, created for them by adults.

Yes, was once jumped on for story I found, a first hand account ( by an officer? ) who, on seeing white people living in an enslaved population, asked why. He was told the child was an illegitimate baby of the family who owned the plantation, one of the daughters having ' gotten in trouble '. Baby was handed over to enslaved, whose opinion of the people involved dropped several hundred feet below what it had been already. Seems deciding who was to be privileged to enjoy what it means to be a child could be dependent on who got to decide who was human, first.

You just know those making these decisions on the part of children have spent the last century plus on uncomfortable chairs in a toasty waiting room somewhere. Guessing it's a fairly minute needle's eye, through which to drag bombast and wealth when children have been victims of it.
 
Sad that it took the sight of enslaved white children to "shock" some people.
I guess enslaved black children just didn't seem so "shocking." View attachment 193065


Seems so crazy, or maybe I wish it did. Really do not mean to get into theology and it's not, just a theory- seems to me children are given to all of us, collectively, as a chance to be better. Everything else, 150 year old justifications on enslaved, reasons children were to suffer would be so much clutter obfuscating this privilege.
 
Right? It's such a shocking thought in 2018, that children would be required to be a certain color before the coin dropped, and it would take the thought of white children enslaved to get the point across. Originally came across the effort because Mom's ancestors left us several of those Cassopia Lawrence photos sold to raise money. Saving grace was the inclusion of black, newly freed children in publicity photos. Hopefully made it tougher to ignore the fact that children have no place in all the ugly out there, created for them by adults.

Yes, was once jumped on for story I found, a first hand account ( by an officer? ) who, on seeing white people living in an enslaved population, asked why. He was told the child was an illegitimate baby of the family who owned the plantation, one of the daughters having ' gotten in trouble '. Baby was handed over to enslaved, whose opinion of the people involved dropped several hundred feet below what it had been already. Seems deciding who was to be privileged to enjoy what it means to be a child could be dependent on who got to decide who was human, first.

You just know those making these decisions on the part of children have spent the last century plus on uncomfortable chairs in a toasty waiting room somewhere. Guessing it's a fairly minute needle's eye, through which to drag bombast and wealth when children have been victims of it.
I wish that it was different today. There was a cynical headline in the "Onion" about developing a vaccine. "We're fifty dead white people away from a cure."
 
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From an article on the "white slave children"-
….The tour and photographs were the result of a joint effort by the Union military (specifically the Department of the Gulf under Maj. Gen. N.P. Banks) the American Missionary Association, and the National Freedmen’s Relief Association. The charitable organizations sold the cartes de visite to raise money for the education of former slaves in newly established schools in Louisiana. But their larger aim was to bolster white Northern support for the war and inspire sympathy for former slaves in the South. Indeed, the photographs appeared at a time when desertions, in the North and South, were frequent, and the population fatigued beyond measure. The photographic campaign was, it seems, a renewed call to arms.
https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/30/the-young-white-faces-of-slavery/
 
Originally came across the effort because Mom's ancestors left us several of those Cassopia Lawrence photos sold to raise money.
Goodness! To actually have such a piece of history!
How precious!
As I've mentioned before, sadly, my Nanny's treasures have been plundered by the redneck side of the family and most likely have already been hocked if not haphazardly discarded. Hopefully they have found their way gently and in tact. It's the pictures (like this!) that I remember and mourn the most.
 
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