The Northern armies reigned victorious, and the rebelling states were returned to the Union. Since the start of the war, the Union devised a strategy. They planned to blockade the South and drive on the Confederate capital. Even though organizing it took about four years, it was the single strategy that won the war. Lincoln and Grant cooperated well.…
Sharecropping was just a step up from slavery, but it allowed newly freed slaves to "somewhat" have something of their own. I say somewhat because their former master still had control over them because they had to sign a sharecropping contract. This sometimes required them to work 10 hours a day and also in harsh conditions. If the sharecropper went against the contract then it would be deducted from their pay. However, through this they were not land owners. They got paid for their work, but some of that money went to taking care of their family and the rest went to paying back debt they owe. They would ultimately in this cycle of owing because they do not make…
There are constant debates on why did the South lose the Civil War. The Civil War ended 150 years ago but that has not affected historians to question the outcome of the war for the Confederacy. According to Gary Gallagher, many historians work backward starting from Appomattox to explain the failure of the war. He continues by stating that those historians claim the reasoning for the failure was caused by the lack will to win the war by the Confederates. Gary Gallagher disagrees with these methods historians use. Gary Gallagher believes that the best way to understand why the Confederates lost the Civil War takes a different approach. This is Gary W. Gallagher’s thesis in his The Confederate War is “Why did so many Confederates fight for so long? Until this question receives the detailed attention long accorded the first, the history of the Confederacy will remain imperfectly understood” (17).…
The Civil Rights Act off 9 April 1866 was made as a response to Black Codes. This ensured that all citizens of the US would enjoy equal treatment under the law. However in reality this wasn’t the case as the whites argued that it gave no reference to the right to vote. (2) ‘At the same time that the amendment was passed Congress authorised segregated black and white schooling in Washington, DC.’ This summarised the fact that the Congress wasn’t in favour of social and political integration and was in a sense an obstacle in the way of black Americans obtaining civil rights. The Military Reconstruction Act of 1867 gave Blacks significant power and this can be supported by Johnson saying that the South was beginning to become Africanised. Education for Blacks improved during…
Ever since the day the South surrendered to the North in May of 1865, Americans have argued on why the South lost. Others argued that the South never had chance to win the war, yet more than half a million people were killed, homes were lost and destroyed and families were torn apart. There are many theories to explain this, many arguing that the South never had a chance to win the Civil War to begin with, for the North out numbered and had better resources than the South at almost every point, militarily.…
The North may have won the war, but they did a horrible job in trying to win the peace. The south had their new form of slavery, which was contained in the "Black Codes"; laws passed throughout the South that laid heavy restrictions on what, who, and where African-Americans could be. President Johnson saw that the only way to get the freedmen as subordinates again was to let the south back in he started signing pardons so fast that they had to assign an office to help him keep up. Johnson didn't interfere with the south and they continued their plantations, with the plantation owners running the south, in essence becoming exactly what they were before the war. It was like it had never happened. When Reconstruction was finished neither the North, South, or Freedmen won the entire peace, but the South won the biggest piece of what they wanted because they got slavery (just without the name), they got an easy pass back into the Union, and things reverted pretty much back to the way they had been before the war.…
African-Americans were the most hated people in the 1800s. Knowing they had a terrible time living in the South some blacks were treated fairly others treated horribly in their conditions on how they work and live. If the blacks did not get a certain amount of labor done they would get whipped on how many times their master think will be fitted for their punishment. That started the rebellion for the blacks runway to the North for the freedom. When the Civil War started over on the South morals were different from the North. African-American males wanted to be part of the war between the North(Union) and South (Confederates). Black males volunteer to be in the military, but they were having a hard time to sign up for the military because of their ethnicity and their color. By Examining the treatment of African-American military members it is clear that they deserved equality during the Civil War.…
When the Confederate Army General Robert E. Lee surrendered to the Union Army General, Ulysses S. Grant at the Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865, many considered the Civil War to be over. The fact that the North was victorious over the South was accepted and the process of reconstruction began in America. It was never openly discussed on why the North defeated the South. However, the question began to slowly arise over time on why the South lost the Civil War. Many historians have become interested in this question and many reasons have been given on why the South lost the Civil War. Lack of manpower, shortages of supplies, and inferior leadership and government were the three main reasons on why the South was defeated in the Civil War.…
After the Civil War, the government had changed from a republican rule to a democratic rule that had hatred towards the South because of conflicts that had arisen during the Civil War. The Northern Republicans wanted to punish the South by forming laws that terminated slavery and granted freed blacks the right to vote, the right to own land, the right to due process, and outlawed discrimination based on race; all were attempts to try and end slavery by reconstructing the justice and social and economic equality among freed blacks. In theory, the thought of reconstruction was practical and could end slavery however, a thought is never the same when put into physical use because there are unforeseen obstacles that cannot be avoided such as the invention of sharecropping, the lynchings of blacks, the court case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the formation of the Ku Klux Klan, “Jim Crow” laws, and the cooperation of white southerners to adhere to these new laws.…
While also maintaining their agrarian status, they were able to do so through convict leasing. What convict leasing allowed the South to do was maintain free labor to citizens while not violating the new slavery laws and creating a new penal system that was cost efficient. Farmers were able to continue having a work force to uphold their land and keep production going. Slaves were freed, in which most either migrated north or became criminals because of their lack of knowledge about the free world. This eventually got them into many a predicament. The majority of slaves that did not become convicts ended up working for their previous owner. Sharecropping also became popular as a contrary to convict leasing. Ex-slaves would care for and live off of a certain amount of the land lord's crops. In return they would give the land lord a measurement of the crops as payment. This system still gave whites the superiority of the mainly black ex-slave population. Another goal of the South was to not let the new population of freed slaves to become of equal social status as the public. Land lords often created a system where the ex-slave would have to give them so much of the crops grown to pay for essential needs, for example clothing or books. The unfortunate situation was that the share croppers never made enough profit to sustain themselves and once again ended upon the street and/or in debt. This resulted in a higher possibility of them becoming…
Sharecropping is a system where a freedman would grow crops on someone else’s land and the farmer would give a portion of the crops to the owner as payment. It seemed like a reasonable way for everyone in the south to be profitable. Freed slaves would use their skills to make money, while landowners use some of the crops to make money without working. Unfortunately, the system had its faults.…
Even with the removal of slavery, we can see this ever-present theme. The US government outlawed slavery, yet there were still means present in which African Americans could not truly be enslaved. One of these means is sharecropping. After the US government outlawed slavery, plantation owners and other landholders were struggling to find people to work their land, so they introduced…
The Civil War was one of the most difficult and trying times during American history. The war ended with the the Union and Confederate states torn apart over one major issue: slavery. With the end of the Civil War came the end of slavery in the United States. Although the former black slaves were now free, they had no land and very few rights, and most did not even have family. Though out reconstruction, blacks were able to gain rights, but were continuously repressed by the white Southerners. The only way to truly enfranchise the former slaves was by effectively disenfranchising their former masters. The reign the masters had over their former slaves disabled the slaves from trying to fulfill their lives as equal American citizens. In most cases, the blacks of American were granted certain freedoms and then were taken away or oppressed by the whites. The former plantation and slave owners were not receptive to treating the blacks as their fellow counterparts.…
A lot of freed people who had been working as slaves began working in the cotton fields as sharecroppers. They were better off than when they were enslaved. Nobody could split their family up or beat them. It was better than working for wages, because then the white people would still have been telling them what to do. But sharecroppers were still poor, and it was hard for them to save money to buy their own land. White landowners liked that, because they didn't want black people to own their own land.…
After 1877, many lost their right to vote or to hold government positions (Rise and fall of Jim Crow, the congress). These Jim Crow laws made african americans in the South lose one of the most important rights of an american, the right to vote. They made the laws of voting ridiculously complicated and biased towards white southerners. “In 1901, the last black representative lost his seat in Congress. It would be 30 years before a black person could gain a seat in the House or Senate,” (Rise and fall of Jim Crow, the congress). It wasn’t the Civil rights act of 1964 where the discrimination on the basis of race took away Jim Crow state laws and gave african americans actual freedom. It took the federal government a century to eliminate Jim Crow laws and the segregation of african americans and white…