The Right to Childhood and the Process of Emancipation in the American Civil War

In 1862, a Black child, no more than five years old, was killed by his master in Virginia “because he hurrahed for the Union.”1 This child might have learned that the approaching Union troops meant freedom, and he could have observed enslaved adults in his community celebrating in a similar manner. His body lay in a medical college where Samuel Derrick Webster, a white Union solider who had joined the Union army in late 1861 at the age of fifteen, remarked on the boy’s horrific death with sadness. Perhaps there were only days between the young child’s death and the arrival of Union regiments that might have provided safety, had his family run to Union lines. The upheaval of war represented a remarkable opening up of freedom for enslaved Americans, but it also led to new dangers for the most vulnerable members of the enslaved population. The war’s atrocities and the postwar experiences of surging white supremacy, lynching, and threats of continued violence viewed through the eyes of those who were most at risk highlights the long-term stakes involved in creating meanings of freedom. In light of these increased dangers, Black children’s actions as they sought education, played with greater senses of freedom, joined parades, or ran away with their families, represented a variety of subversive rebellions that placed questions of childhood and age at the heart of the fight for emancipation.2 The