Civil War Reconstruction Research Paper

In the year 1865, marks the end of the civil war with a victory to the North and granted freedom to some 4 million slaves but also marked the start of reconstruction. It was a process to put the pieces that were broken during the war back together. However, this wasn’t an easy task, for there were a lot of uprising challenges. In order to repair the nation there has to be a strong bond between the South accepting to be in the union and for freedmen to have rights but due to fear from the North who thought that it will lead to a race war and the South who believed that former slaves would come back to kill their slave masters it was nearly impossible. Reconstruction is a revolution because it was sudden, successfully caused a complete change
To reunite the South with the Union; Abraham Lincoln proposed his reconstruction plan also known as the 10th percent plan which required each Southern state to swear an oath of allegiance to the Union for readmission. Lincoln could make the South take an oath by passing the Emancipation Proclamation which freed slaves. The South’s economy would suffer if slaves weren’t working and that’s how the civil war would come to an end. However, even though the Emancipation proclamation was passed; Abraham Lincoln was killed, and the 10th percent plan wasn’t passed. Radical Republicans took Lincoln’s role but they were mad at the South, and blamed them for causing the Civil War. They wanted the South to pay and be punished. Secondly, the Radical Republicans needed to protect 4 million freed slaves. That is why Thaddeus Stevens was a leading advocate of redistributing land to former slaves as part of the reconstruction. As it is shown in the document “Thaddeus Stevens’s Land Confiscation Bill”, (1867) it mentions “on the 4th day of March A.D. 1861, or since, shall have distributed to them as follows, namely: to each male person who is the head of a family, forty acres; to each adult male, whether the head of a family or not, forty acres; to each widow who is the head of a family, forty acres” (351). This would allow black people to
Now that the slaves were free they really didn’t know how to survive all alone without the help of whites. Many blacks had different interpretations for the meaning of freedom. As stated in the document “African Americans Talk About Their Personal Experiences of NewFound Freedom” (1865) it states “Soldiers, all of a sudden, was everywhere-coming in bunches, crossing and walking and riding. Everyone was a-singing. We was walking on golden clouds. Hallelujah” (1). This shows that the black people were so happy it felt as if they were walking over clouds and some people would leave to find freedom according to the document it mentions “but right off colored folks started on the move. They seemed to want to get closer to freedom, so they’d know what it was-like it was a place or a city” (1). Other blacks believed that they would become rich because they were free as it is stated “We thought we was going to get rich like the white folks. We thought we was going to be richer than the white folks” (1). Overall, a lot of black people didn’t know what to do afterward being free. Some were struggling to survive to support their families. They couldn’t find jobs, making some of them go back to their former masters and sharecrop. Sharecropping wasn’t good even though the black people were given a home and food by the whites, they were stuck in poverty. Many people saw that the