“’For Children Who Care to Learn’: Making Resilient Children in Patty Gray’s Journey to the Cotton Islands”

This paper explores the ways that Unitarian-Transcendentalist and social reformer Caroline Wells Healey Dall, in her children’s book series Patty Gray’s Journey, broadly, and its second book, specifically, translated slavery, the Civil War, and the aftermath of both for young readers.  Her insistence that children, especially white, Northern children, must know what slavery was and what war was and what both left behind is a reflection of her belief that resilience is forged through knowledge—a belief rooted directly in her Unitarian and Transcendentalist principles. When, Dall prompts us to ask, does the privilege of childhood innocence give way for real-worldly resilience?