- Title Pages
- Acknowledgments
- Foreword
- Introduction
- Part I Children and the Sectional Conflict
- 1 “Waked Up to Feel”
- 2 “Train Up a Child in the Way He Should Go”
- 3 “What Is a Person Worth at Such a Time”
- Part II Children of War
- 4 A “Rebel to [His] Govt. and to His Parents”
- 5 Thrills for Children
- 6 “Good Children Die Happy”
- 7 Children of the March
- 8 Love in Battle
- Part III Aftermaths
- 9 Caught in the Crossfire
- 10 “Free Ourselves, but Deprived of Our Children”
- 11 Reconstructing Social Obligation
- 12 Orphans and Indians
- Part IV Epilogue
- 13 Preparing the Next Generation for Massive Resistance
- Documents: Through the Eyes of Civil War Children
- “I Hope by My Next Birthday We Will Have Peace in Our Land”: Carrie Berry Endures the Fall of Atlanta
- “A Strenuous and Tragic Affair”: Life on the Northern Home Front
- “The Threshold of a New Year”: High School Journalists Weigh In on the Civil War
- “Sports in the Days of the Sixties”: War and Play
- “De drums wus beatin’”: Caroline Richardson Meets the Yankees
- “A Momentous and Eventful Day”: Freedom Comes to Booker T. Washington
- “Born in the First Smoke of the Great Conflict”: Hamlin Garland’s Father Comes Home
- Questions for Consideration
- Suggested Readings
- About the Contributors
- Index
Reconstructing Social Obligation
Reconstructing Social Obligation
White Orphan Asylums in Post-emancipation Richmond
- Chapter:
- (p.173) 11 Reconstructing Social Obligation
- Source:
- Children and Youth during the Civil War Era
- Author(s):
Catherine A. Jones
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
This chapter discusses how the disposition of orphans in the postwar context became an ethically charged problem in Virginia. White Virginians used race to shape understandings of ethical obligation among the state's citizens. The Richmond Female Humane Association (RFHA) and the Richmond Male Orphan Asylum (RMOA), expanded their missions to serve more children, reduced the length of children's stays in the asylum through placing out, and confronted disagreement about what constituted appropriate care for white orphans in the wake of the Civil War. The nineteenth-century definition of orphans as fatherless children tightened the association between orphaned white children and fallen Confederate soldiers, which in turn helped the advocates of Richmond's orphan asylums recast the bonds of Confederate loyalty into an explicitly racialized and historicized understanding of social obligation.
Keywords: children, youth, white orphans, Virginia, ethical obligations, social obligation, race, orphan asylums, Confederate loyalty
NYU Press Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
- Title Pages
- Acknowledgments
- Foreword
- Introduction
- Part I Children and the Sectional Conflict
- 1 “Waked Up to Feel”
- 2 “Train Up a Child in the Way He Should Go”
- 3 “What Is a Person Worth at Such a Time”
- Part II Children of War
- 4 A “Rebel to [His] Govt. and to His Parents”
- 5 Thrills for Children
- 6 “Good Children Die Happy”
- 7 Children of the March
- 8 Love in Battle
- Part III Aftermaths
- 9 Caught in the Crossfire
- 10 “Free Ourselves, but Deprived of Our Children”
- 11 Reconstructing Social Obligation
- 12 Orphans and Indians
- Part IV Epilogue
- 13 Preparing the Next Generation for Massive Resistance
- Documents: Through the Eyes of Civil War Children
- “I Hope by My Next Birthday We Will Have Peace in Our Land”: Carrie Berry Endures the Fall of Atlanta
- “A Strenuous and Tragic Affair”: Life on the Northern Home Front
- “The Threshold of a New Year”: High School Journalists Weigh In on the Civil War
- “Sports in the Days of the Sixties”: War and Play
- “De drums wus beatin’”: Caroline Richardson Meets the Yankees
- “A Momentous and Eventful Day”: Freedom Comes to Booker T. Washington
- “Born in the First Smoke of the Great Conflict”: Hamlin Garland’s Father Comes Home
- Questions for Consideration
- Suggested Readings
- About the Contributors
- Index
