Reseña de Ties That Bind, Bonds That Break: Children in the Reorganization of Households in Postemancipation Virginia (Essay)

Ties That Bind, Bonds That Break: Children in the Reorganization of Households in Postemancipation Virginia (Essay) de Journal of Southern History Resumen del Libro

ON JANUARY 13, 1868, MARCUS STERLING HOPKINS REFLECTED ON A busy day of mediating disputes in his makeshift offices in Gordonsville, Virginia. In his diary, Hopkins gave free voice to his frustrations with the Virginians, black and white, whom he encountered in his capacity as a Freedmen's Bureau agent, musing that only a substantial infusion of northerners could save the area from its unrelenting backwardness. His contempt for the people seeking his help took on a harder edge when he reflected on freedpeople's efforts at household reorganization: "They are very sharp to get children who are old enough to earn something and to hire them out.... The relatives of orphans apply to me often for such as are old enough to be profitable but I can seldom get them to take the slightest care or interest in infants. Blood don't seem to thicken as the phrase goes until children get to be about ten years of age.'' (1) In Hopkins's estimation, freedpeople's claims of kinship were instrumental at best, mercenary at worst. Hopkins's assessment, though marked by prejudice and a narrow frame of reference, gives insight into the competing expectations and material need that influenced the process of household reorganization in postemancipation Virginia. (2) Hopkins's notion that freedpeople sized up the productive capacity of children before deciding whether to admit them into the household contravened his own belief that kinship's value derived from its capacity to generate social obligation independent of material interests. Further, his imputation of profit as the central motive for taking children into a household evoked the slave market, which was the quintessential symbol of slavery's violence to family relationships, underscoring how powerfully recent history had informed postemancipation moral evaluation. (3) Although Hopkins's diary does not discuss the significance that freedpeople attached to their choices, it seems likely that they would have rejected his unspoken analogy between selective household integration and the slave market. Nevertheless, his preoccupation with the effects of slavery on the reconstruction of postemancipation families resembles the concerns expressed by many Virginians, white and black. They, like Hopkins, found that using kinship as the primary principle of household organization sometimes caused conflict between its economic and affective dimensions. (4) Further, competing expectations, grounded in culturally and historically specific experiences, impinged on the process in unpredictable ways.

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