"The Sheriff's Children" first appeared in the Independent in 1888. Eleven years later, it was included in Chesnutt's second collection of fiction, The Wife of His Youth, and Other Stories of the Color Line. This collection blatantly raised issues more generally left untouched, such as racial miscegenation, the divided racial identity of mixed-blood Americans, and the racial barriers that kept African Americans from fully participating in American life. The Nashville Banner even outright accused Chesnutt of being an "advocate of miscegenation."

Although the collection was not as well-received as Chesnutt's previous volume of folktales, W. D. Howells, the well-known literary editor and writer, praised it in The Atlantic Monthly. Both Howells and fellow editor Hamilton Wright Mabie declared Chesnutt a first-class realist. Wrote Howells, "It is not from their racial interest that we could first wish to speak of [Chesnutt's stories], though that must have a very...