{"id":35725,"date":"2014-02-06T13:33:38","date_gmt":"2014-02-06T13:33:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=35725"},"modified":"2014-02-06T20:09:51","modified_gmt":"2014-02-06T20:09:51","slug":"the-young-white-faces-of-slavery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=35725","title":{"rendered":"The Young White Faces of Slavery"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Young White Faces of Slavery<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2014-01-30<\/p>\n

Mary Niall Mitchell<\/strong><\/a>, Joseph Tregle Professor of Early American History
\nUniversity of New Orleans<\/em><\/p>\n

For Northern readers scanning the Jan. 30, 1864, issue of Harper\u2019s Weekly<\/em> for news from the South, a large engraving on page 69 brought the war home in an unexpected way. Drawn from a photograph, it featured eight recently freed slaves from Union-occupied New Orleans<\/a>. At the back of the portrait stood three adults, Wilson Chinn, Mary Johnson and Robert Whitehead. In the foreground were five children \u2014 Charles Taylor, Rebecca Huger, Rosa Downs, Augusta Broujey and Isaac White \u2014 ranging in age from 7 to 11. Their gaze was trained on the camera, but in the context of the magazine, the effect was that they all seemed to be looking at the reader.<\/p>\n

Instead of the coarse garments worn by most enslaved people in the South, they were well dressed, the men and boys in suits and Mary Johnson and the girls in dresses and petticoats. But it was not their attire that confounded readers. Rather, the pale skin and smooth hair of four of the children \u2014 Charles, Augusta, Rebecca and Rosa \u2014 overturned a different set of Northern expectations about the appearance of people enslaved in the South: that a person\u2019s African-American heritage would always, somehow, be visible and that only \u201cnegroes\u201d could be slaves. The caption beneath the group, like the portrait itself, was meant to provoke the armchair viewer\u2019s unease: \u201cEmancipated Slaves\u201d it proclaimed, \u201cWhite and Colored.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was no accident that the young \u201cwhite\u201d slaves resembled the children of the magazine\u2019s white middle-class readership, which is to say Northern children who were far removed from the threat of enslavement, or so their parents liked to think. The sponsors of the group from New Orleans anticipated precisely the kind of effect such children might have on Northern middle-class readers. As \u201cthe offspring of white fathers through two or three generations,\u201d the Harper\u2019s Weekly editors explained, \u201cthey are as white, as intelligent, as docile, as most of our own children.\u201d…<\/p>\n

…Not surprisingly, the lightest-skinned children caused the most stir among Northern editors and audiences. The two lightest-skinned girls, Rebecca and Rosa, seemed to have the greatest appeal, judging from the large number of cartes de visite<\/em><\/a> that survive of them. About Rebecca, Harper\u2019s Weekly wrote: \u201cto all appearance, she is perfectly white. Her complexion, hair, and features show not the slightest trace of negro blood.\u201d With their fair skin and elegant dress, Rebecca and Rosa evoked for most viewers the \u201cfancy girls\u201d sold in the New Orleans slave market. The fate that awaited these girls as concubines to white men was clear to most viewers at the time. Their tender youth compelled Northerners to renew their commitment to the war and rescue girls like these…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Young White Faces of Slavery The New York Times 2014-01-30 Mary Niall Mitchell, Joseph Tregle Professor of Early American History University of New Orleans For Northern readers scanning the Jan. 30, 1864, issue of Harper\u2019s Weekly for news from the South, a large engraving on page 69 brought the war home in an unexpected […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,459,8,6940,20],"tags":[16927,2640,2327],"class_list":["post-35725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-history","category-media-archive","category-slavery","category-usa","tag-harpers-weekly","tag-new-york-times","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35725"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35725\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}