Freedom's Generation: Coming of Age in the Era of Emancipation

FAIN: FT-279242-21

Ben Max Davidson
Saint Michael's College (Colchester, VT 05446-0001)

Writing and editing two chapters of a book on how the first generation of Americans who came of age during the Civil War and Reconstruction understood freedom.

What did freedom mean after the end of slavery in the United States? In order to answer that question, this project investigates the lives of black and white children, in the North, South, and West, who grew up during the Civil War era. By tracing the lives of figures both well-known and obscure from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, I contend that this generation’s experiences illuminate how kinship, childhood, race, and domestic life intertwined at the heart of the struggle over freedom’s meanings. While scholars have conducted important work on nineteenth-century childhoods and on Civil War memory, this book demonstrates that “freedom’s generation,” a group of young people who exercised enormous influence both on meanings of freedom during the Civil War era and on fights over memory after the conflict ended, have not yet received their due as one of the most pivotal generations in U.S. history.