Title: Young Slave Boys. Source: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library Document. Type: Visual Sources from the Schomburg Photographs and Prints Division (Slavery – Slaves – Portraits)- SC-CN-90-0190.

Sir, I beg leave sir to ask your attention to a case of ‘binding out’ that has just come to my notice, the most affecting remnant of slavery I have ever seen. It is the case of an orphan lad, John Lory, bound out less than two years since to his former master Mrs Kellers…from a dark room…stepped out a lad of about 15… ….for small offences and unintentional he was beaten several times with the cowhide, often struck and knocked about over the head, was not allowed to go to school and kept quite closely at indoors work…as a child he fared worse than in slavery.[1]

In pre-industrial economies, that children contributed labor was common and considered essential for the maintenance of an independent household. Nonetheless, without the protection of their parental rights, African-American adults lost the labor of their children in the murky freedom that the American authorities granted. In 1935 W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “the slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.” In that brief moment in the sun, Reconstruction putatively liberated all slaves and granted citizenship to a black population who had been permanently constrained under the shackles of bondage. Nevertheless, in many ways formal emancipation was a minimal definition of slavery’s end as abolition was followed by a protracted struggle to define the meaning of freedom. In a period also marked by increased levels of immigration, questions of citizenship, possession, and guardianship flooded political and social thought of the time. The South had lost its primary system of labor and questions concerning what would fill this void inevitably came to the fore. Despite their newfound liberty thousands of black children were legally and illegally removed from their homes and placed under the service of white adults, sometimes without, but imperatively, frequently also with the consent of their parents. Without any recognition at all, social or political, the black child fell between the cracks in a postbellum world that demanded labor entities.

Apprenticeship had a long history in America, both for white and black children. However, as the South moved into the later nineteenth century, the apprenticeship laws that regulated a black child mirrored exactly the economic, political, racial, and social conundrums of the society of the time. White and black children in the nineteenth-century American South were very much a commodity. Marginalised because of their age, and class, children were silent and invisible. Black children carried an even more precarious burden as representatives of a raced childhood. Not only were they silent and invisible, they were subjects of both power and control as the unequal, unrecognised, and abused ‘other’ of white adults, white children, and also frequently, their own parents.

This was a society in which white men were very much kings of their households, which extended into the larger southern society. In slavery many ruled over their own families and the families of their slaves. However, upon emancipation blacks sought to construct a new life for themselves and their families. With emancipation and the legal recognition of the African American family in the South, former slaves had theoretically gained the right to control their offspring. The desire of white planters to maintain authority over black children, however, significantly undercut these parental rights. Nevertheless, in the control and deployment of their own children, black parents could withhold from whites an important element of economic control, exercising power over their former owners, while simultaneously supporting the needs of their family’s financial health. Freedmen’s Bureau records are replete with letters from freedwomen demanding the return of their children who had been bound out without their consent. In the very act of rejecting the legality of indentures that lacked their consent, women made a political statement about their right to what was theirs as citizens. Black women occupied a unique status in the years of Reconstruction of the U.S. South, a status that contrasted sharply with the positions of white women, white men, and black men. Race prevented black women from achieving privileges associated with white womanhood. Gender restricted them from citizenship, a status that white men preserved and black men fought to acquire. Black women occupied a position that unlike elite and poor white women was not yet rigidly defined by law or custom.

In the type of emancipation that was granted across the American South, much of the very contradictions inherent in the concept of ‘freedom’ were enacted. For the first time blacks were granted the ability to wander, to form and reinstate familial bonds, the right to chose where to live, to chose lovers. Emancipation did offer a much more intimate freedom, and yet simultaneously, the laws outlawing slavery restricted this freedom to contract – through apprenticeship, share-cropping, and indentured servitude. In a myriad of ways the residues of slavery lingered. Reconstruction offered an opportunity to deconstruct and yet this was an instance of going back in time in a moment that promised to move forward. The interconnections between past and present, and between slavery and freedom, are apparent in the study of apprenticeship. Emancipation in no way marked the end of bondage. The illegal and legal bonding of freed children offers an illustrative insight into the ironic disappointments of freedom. Children have always taken part, and continue to take part, in social and economic activities as members of the groups to which they belong. Nevertheless, for both white and black adults, children had a dollar value in the postbellum era of the South. Black children were further disadvantaged because of their race as they became subjects of worth and entities to be bartered. Consequently, more than many others, the black child’s moment in the sun was fleeting and in the ties that they were bound, they were children of their families and citizens of the New South, but they were also children of slavery and mastery, children of shackles and contracts, and as children of apprenticeship, they symbolically represented one of the many ‘skeletons’ in freedom’s closet.

 Further Reading

John W. Blassingame, (eds), Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiography (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1977)

Herbert G. Gutman,  The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1976)

Mary Niall Mitchell, Raising Freedom’s Child: Black Children and Visions of the Future After Slavery (New York, New York University Press, 2008)

Thavolia Glymph,  Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Lisa Collins has an undergraduate and postgraduate degree from Queen’s University, Belfast and has just returned from Harvard University where she studied for one year on a Frank Knox Scholarship.