Figure 1.--This African American nanny poses with her little charge who looks to be about 4 years old. He wears a plid tunic with long pants. She must have been an important member of the family to be photographed with her young charge. She has a half smile playing on her lips. We are left to wonder wht she was thinking. The CDV portrait is undated, but the pose (more like a Daguerreotype pose) aand the boy's outfit suggests that it was a very early CDV, perhaps before or the very beginning of the Civil War. The photographer was George W. Evans, Philadelphia. Click on the image for a fuller discussion.

The history of black Americans before the Civil War primarily focuses on slavery. While most blacks lived in the South as slaves, there were free blacks in both the northern and southern states. The northern states relatively soon after the Revolution abolished slavery. This was done state by state. While slavery was abolished, not all slaves were immeiately emancipated in the North. Northern blacks became a largely urban population, in contrast to southern blacks. Blacks were involved in a range of mostly mannual occupations, in large measure because of limitations on educational opportunity. Women often worked as family domestics. Despite the open racism in the United Sttes, interesting there seems to have been realtively little interest among free blacks to return to Africa, even after the American Colonization Society set up a settlent which would become Liberia. Even when emancipated, blacks in the south were not afforced full civil rights such as the franchise. There was also resistance in allowing black children to attend public schools. And the Supreme Court Dread Scott decesion essentially meant that blacks even in Free Staes could not be citizens.

Created: 3:13 AM 3/8/2007
Last updated: 12:47 AM 5/10/2008