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Set in Virginia during Reconstruction, Elsie's Motherhood (1876) is a sustained attack on the Ku Klux Klan. The fifth volume of Martha Finley's best-selling, nineteenth-century American series has a remarkable plot for at least two reasons. First, Finley's stubbornly pro-South, pro-slavery bias is evident in the series' earlier novels - Elsie Dinsmore (1867); Elsie's Holidays at Roselands (1868); Elsie's Girlhood (1872); and Elsie's Womanhood (1875). When Elsie, the daughter of a wealthy slave-owner, witnesses the whipping of the female field-slave Suse, she is initially horrified, until the other slaves convince her that Suse deserves her punishment: "She's always 'plaining ob de misery in her back, an' misery in her head; but don't ebery one hab a misery, some kind, most days? An' go on workin' all de same" (Girlhood 64). After the Civil War, Elsie's ex-slaves "don't want no freedom" (Womanhood 276). They prefer to continue "as kind and generously cared for as in the old days of slavery" on her plantations (Motherhood 31). second, Finley's depiction of the Klan is written for young readers before many books questioning Reconstruction had become popular for adult readers. Elsie's Motherhood predates by three years Albion Winegar Tourgee's semiautobiographical A Fool's Errand (1879), one of the best-known contemporary novels about Reconstruction. Written from the point of view of a transplanted Northerner, Tourgee's novel is, however, intended for an adult audience, while Finley's appears within a series widely regarded as fiction for girls.
The Civil War continues to be a perennially popular theme for children's fiction. Yet, the Reconstruction Era of 1865 to 1877, which saw the emergence of the Klan's first incarnation, has been virtually ignored by children's novelists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Anxiety about Reconstruction sometimes surfaced indirectly. Brandy Parris explains, for example, how the animal stories published in Our Young Folks, a Northern children's magazine (1865-73), "enabled the discussion of sensitive issues surrounding Reconstruction by displacing tensions between people onto less politically charged tensions with and between animals" (27). Through these anthropomorphized tales, white children were taught sympathy for formerly enslaved African Americans, but the images tended to reinforce both the idea that African Americans were essentially Other and that they were unable to cope with freedom.
In general, Northern and Southern children's writers...