Impossible Children: Child Prisoners in Postemancipation Virginia

For the liberal architects of Reconstruction policy, emancipation would redeem former slaves only if it initiated a larger transformation that culminated in freedpeople’s adoption of the aged and gendered roles that... [ view full abstract ]

For the liberal architects of Reconstruction policy, emancipation would redeem former slaves only if it initiated a larger transformation that culminated in freedpeople’s adoption of the aged and gendered roles that distinguished middle class domestic life. For children, this meant parents would command their labor, which was to be kept out of the marketplace and directed toward schooling and family work. For most freed children, however, this was not the future that emerged. The thousands of children incarcerated in the aftermath of the Civil War offer the most dramatic evidence that new forms of unfreedom, not cozy domesticity, were often the sequel to emancipation. In writing a history of the children imprisoned in the Virginia State Penitentiary between 1865 and 1902, I’m in interested in thinking about what it means to treat incarcerated children not as exceptions but as a key population that might recast our understanding of nineteenth century childhood. In this paper I’d like to discuss the implications of categorizing prisoners under eighteen as children. This is an interpretive intervention rather than a straightforward descriptive proposition, and I am wrestling with thinking through its implications for this project. I defend the choice in part by reconstructing the legal flux around the meaning of age in this moment, but I also argue that taking the child-ness of such prisoners seriously sheds light on how contemporaries used law and print to bind criminality to blackness and empty youth of its capacity to qualify culpability and elicit mercy.