"There is No Place Like a Happy Home": 'Information Wanted' Notices, the Christian Recorder, and the Idealization of the Black Family in Post-Emancipation America

This work in progress concerns the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) newspaper, The Christian Recorder and their publication of “Information Wanted” notices, posted by enslaved and later, freedpeople, hoping to track the whereabouts of lost family members sold and separated from them as a result of the domestic slave trade. The paper considers these notices from 1865 through the turn of the century, as indicative of one of means through which the AME used the ideal of the “family” to engender positive images for Blacks themselves, but also to dispel the commonly held myths of white Americans that the Black population - particularly the formerly enslaved - were ignorant and immoral. While the Recorder had its own particular reasons for running these notices, the formerly enslaved used them as a public forum to narrate, and perhaps begin to make sense of and articulate, their own stories of loss and longing. Feeding into this focus on Black families and the impact of racial slavery, the paper will also consider Julia C. Collins’ and Frances E. Watkins Harper’s  short stories and serialized novels published in the Recorder during the Civil War and into the early years of Reconstruction. Both of their contributions focussed on the tangled web of untruths that had decimated the family lives of the enslaved and later, freedpeople. For the Recorder these pieces placed family at the centre of the story shining a light on the importance of  stability and faithfulness – the model of the “Black Family” that the Recorder wished to promote. For both Collins and Harper however their stories told tales that sought to challenge the record of white enslaver benevolence and harmony in the “plantation household”. They also both spoke to the lies that had undergirded the “domestic settings” of enslavement and provided something of a roadmap for how Black people might begin to move forward in the wake of Union victory to reclaim their lost family members or at least create a meaningful narrative dedicated to a ideal of the Black family and “my people.”

Dr Rebecca J. Fraser is an Associate Professor of American History and Culture at the University of East Anglia. Her principal research interest concern histories of race and gender in the 19th century U.S, with a particular focus on histories of Black resistance and enslaved cultural lives, particularly the family. Her previous books have included Black Female Intellectuals in 19th Century America: Born to Bloom Unseen? (Routledge, 2023); Gender, Race and Family in Nineteenth-Century America: From Northern Woman to Plantation Mistress (Palgrave, 2012); and Courtship and Love among the Enslaved in North Carolina (Mississippi, 2007).