Black History: “Emancipated Slaves, White and Colored”

While the country was fighting in the Civil War over the issue of enslavement, abolitionists were moving toward a new fight of educating emancipated Blacks. Pictures from the January 30, 1864 issue of Harper’s Weekly titled “Emancipated Slaves, White and Colored,” shows a picture of three emancipated Blacks, a young Black boy, and 4 bi-racial children. The picture was put in Harper’s Weekly in effort to raise money to go toward schools for free Blacks. Each of the children featured had descriptions of their status and why they could not progress because they were turned away for being slaves.

The bi-racial children in the picture were labeled as ‘White slaves’ as a way to invoke compassion in white northerners, who although thought slavery was immoral, weren’t particularly supportive of the idea of educating Blacks. Author of “Portraits of Slave Children” Kathleen Collins, wrote that the pictures of “Caucasian-featured children” would, sympathetically, push “Northern benefactors to contribute to the future of a race to which these children found themselves arbitrarily.” Although according to the “one-drop rule” those children would have been considered Black, the descriptions in the article illustrated Collin’s conclusion with the children described as being “as white, as intelligent, as docile, as most of our own children.”  The editor then proceeds to write that slavery doomed the children to the “fate of swine.”

The pictures and description given in Harper’s Weekly was all a part of a fight of the progressive few to advance the status of Blacks. The pictures testify to an American society more accepting of people of light skin tone. In the eyes of the Northerners that abolitionists sought to gain empathy and money from, Blacks weren’t good enough. If they had been, there would have been no need to portray bi-racial children as “White slaves.” The picture makes one see the parallels of then and now, and makes one question how much has really changed.