Adaptation Displacement: The source material is the now incredibly obscure 1911 play The Littlest Rebel by Edward Peple. Check it out on Internet Archive if you're curious.
Heartwarming in Hindsight: James Henry at one point asks “Why is a shoe called a shoe?” and other questions about how words got invented, in an attempt to sound smart, and promptly gets told to shut up. If he had lived decades later, when linguistics became a valued field of study, he would be considered very intellectual for thinking about the origins of words.
Values Dissonance: The film is considered pretty cringeworthy by modern standards due to its racist undertones and Confederacy sympathy, pretty much making it the Song of the South of Shirley Temple's filmography (minus the animated segments plus a Gender Flip of course). The play goes beyond merely cringeworthy and into The Birth of a Nation (1915) levels of racism, which was inevitable since it's decades older than the film.
on Internet Archive if you're curious.