Quiz for Thinking Like a Historian:
Childhood in Black and White

Question

1. What do these sources reveal about how slave children were raised in the mid-nineteenth-century South?

A.
B.
C.
D.
Correct. The answer is c. Sources 2 and 3 suggest that older slave women who were not working in the fields provided care and supervision for slave children during the workday.
Incorrect. The answer is c. Sources 2 and 3 suggest that older slave women who were not working in the fields provided care and supervision for slave children during the workday.

Question

2. The artist who created the engraving (source 4) would most likely have agreed with which of the following statements?

A.
B.
C.
D.
Correct. The answer is b. The creator of this engraving portrayed the mistress as a benevolent figure who provided food, clothing, shelter, medicine, and nurturing to slave children. The artist’s depiction of the children and their mistress reinforced the idea that slavery was a “positive good” that raised the status of African Americans.
Incorrect. The answer is b. The creator of this engraving portrayed the mistress as a benevolent figure who provided food, clothing, shelter, medicine, and nurturing to slave children. The artist’s depiction of the children and their mistress reinforced the idea that slavery was a “positive good” that raised the status of African Americans.

Question

3. Which of the following factors was the most important influence on children, according to source 5?

A.
B.
C.
D.
Correct. The answer is d. According to source 5, middle-class mothers should care for their own children because they alone could raise them with the proper health, habits, morals, and religion. The author suggests that children raised by “servants, whose tastes, feelings, morals, manners, and language are but a little removed from the lower animals of creation . . . [will] imbibe habits, which will grow with their growth . . . and forever conceal the parent stock.”
Incorrect. The answer is d. According to source 5, middle-class mothers should care for their own children because they alone could raise them with the proper health, habits, morals, and religion. The author suggests that children raised by “servants, whose tastes, feelings, morals, manners, and language are but a little removed from the lower animals of creation . . . [will] imbibe habits, which will grow with their growth . . . and forever conceal the parent stock.”

Question

4. Which group was the most likely intended audience for the “visiting cards” in source 6?

A.
B.
C.
D.
Correct. The answer is d. The cards were most likely intended to appeal to the values of middle-class white mothers. They were meant to illustrate the poor conditions under which slave children lived and also to insinuate that, if such children were freed from slavery and raised in a more middle-class environment, they would grow to be productive and respectable adults.
Incorrect. The answer is d. The cards were most likely intended to appeal to the values of middle-class white mothers. They were meant to illustrate the poor conditions under which slave children lived and also to insinuate that, if such children were freed from slavery and raised in a more middle-class environment, they would grow to be productive and respectable adults.

Question

5. The artist who created the cards in source 6 aimed to communicate which of the following messages?

A.
B.
C.
D.
Correct. The answer is a. The artist who created the cards was an abolitionist aiming to convey the message that slavery harmed women and children. The combination of the photos and the text plays on the sale of the children’s mother and their rescue and rehabilitation by Union soldiers and Quakers.
Incorrect. The answer is a. The artist who created the cards was an abolitionist aiming to convey the message that slavery harmed women and children. The combination of the photos and the text plays on the sale of the children’s mother and their rescue and rehabilitation by Union soldiers and Quakers.