ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the essays that Collins, a free black woman, wrote for The Christian Recorder during the latter years of the Civil War, reflecting on how free black women might have envisioned freedom for their race and the difficulties presented in achieving this in reality. Collins began her publishing career with the Recorder in April 1864, subsequently writing five more short essays through January 1865. She then wrote a serialized novel in the Recorder that was only half-published by fall of 1865. Given the wealth of scholarship devoted to enslaved African Americans in the antebellum South, comparatively little attention has been paid to the lives and experiences of free black people as they negotiated their experiences of freedom in the United States. Education for free black children in the antebellum Northern states was shaped by the funding demands necessary to build, staff and maintain schools.
