Preview

Slavery and Civil War Slaves

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1149 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Slavery and Civil War Slaves
Everyone knows about president Lincoln and the emancipation proclamation. How the north won the civil war and slavery was abolished. It is a nice thought. But it was not that easy. After the civil war slaves across the United States were granted their freedom. Being granted freedom and being free were two different things, many slaves would learn this the hard way. Freedmen and women were now on their own and had to face many obstacles. The biggest being racism. This battle for equality would last from the moment of freedom to our present day, and will sadly continue for future generations. I would like to discuss the methods that the overwhelmingly white southerner power structure used after the Civil War to make the exercise of freedom challenging for former slaves. The actions that freed people took in order to challenge the efforts of certain white southerners to keep them in a slave status following the end of the Civil War. Some aspects of the post-Reconstruction political and social climate, that left former slaves and other groups vulnerable to discrimination and second class citizenship. And the effects of racial tension from the nineteenth century, that have spilled over into American society today.
After the civil war approximately 4 million slaves were finally granted the freedom they so desperately wanted. Newly freed slaves now had bigger challenges to face. Most had no family, no home, could not read or write, no monetary means, and limited skills. One quality that they maintained was hope and persistence. Freedmen face many obstacles trying to obtain equal standing among whites. The powerhouse of southern white supremacy proved to make this difficult for newly freed slaves. Freedmen now faced even more challenges such as Black Codes, Share cropping, and the KKK.
Black codes were designed to drive the ex-slaves back to plantations. In the years of 1865 and 1866 state legislatures in the south indorsed a sequence of laws. The laws were implicated

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    I think that black codes were an attempt at reestablishing slavery. They forced African-Americans to work. If they didn’t work or if they ran away from their job they would either be forced to return or go to jail. Since they had to go back to work they usually ended up back on plantations. States were allowed to decide on “separate but equal” laws, keeping blacks apart from whites. The Jim Crow laws end up enforcing segregation. Also African-Americans had to have a place to live and they usually couldn’t vote unless they had a grandfather that voted before the civil war. Southern whites wanted their slaves back. And this is the way they tried to do it.…

    • 118 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Assignment 1 AMH2020

    • 654 Words
    • 2 Pages

    During reconstruction, the meaning of freedom suited many different types of interpretation; the perception of freedom between former slaves and their slaves masters were very contradictory. To begin with, African-Americans had suffered severe abuse over those years of slavery, so to them, the meaning of freedom was basically a hope that in the future, they won’t experience all kind of punishment and exploration that they have been experienced so far. Besides that, formers slaves were demanding equal civil and political rights. In the same way, they valued their freedom by establishing their own schools and churches, reuniting families that were separated under slavery and seeking financial dependence. Foner (2014) supports the same argument: “Blacks relished the opportunity to demonstrate their liberation from the regulation, significant and trivial, associated with slavery. They openly held mass meeting and religious services free of white supervision” (p. 557) . In addition, Foner (1014) also found “Former slaves’ ideas of freedom, like those of rural people throughout the world, were directly related to landownership” (p. 560) . On other hand, their slaves masters’ perception of freedom was different. For example, most Southerners reacted the emancipation with dismay, according to Foner (2014) , Southern leaders didn’t want to accept reality “Freedom still meant hierarchy and mastery; it was a privilege not a right, a carefully defined legal status rather than an open-ended entitlement” (p. 561) .…

    • 654 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The South was economically devastated and socially revolutionized by emancipation. As slave owners reluctantly confronted the end of slave labor, blacks took their first steps in freedom. Black churches and freedmen’s schools helped the former slaves begin to shape their own destiny.…

    • 309 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The slaves reacted to reconstruction plan in many different ways. Many celebrated and enjoyed the new privileges they have never had before. For example, former slaves were able to take the opportunity to become literate, and even able to choose a new career. More so, African Americans were able to enjoy having legal rights, to purchase land, vote, participate in politics, and even use public accommodations. Majority of the freed slaves went for a search for new and better opportunities as freed slaves. Yet, there were still African Americans that remained loyal to their slave owners, and continued to work for them. Some even turned to violence, and…

    • 508 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    13th Amendment Dbq

    • 708 Words
    • 3 Pages

    After the 13th Amendment was passed, African American slaves were freed from their lifetime involuntary servitude, and life for them seemed to be on the way to happiness (Document A). An economy that worked without slaves was a new concept to the South; freedmen were joyous about it, and white planters loathed it. The United States underwent a sort of revolution in its economy and its social hierarchy (Document D). After the Civil War ended, numerous changes had to be made to the South including rebuilding the infrastructure, maintaining hostility towards blacks, punishing or relieving Confederate leader, and determining the rights of newly freed slaves. Many of the South’s political, social, and economic difficulties link with the issues of freed slaves.…

    • 708 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Black/Codes Research Paper

    • 1504 Words
    • 7 Pages

    ‘Black~Codes’ were legal statutes and constitutional amendments enacted by the ex~Confederate states following the Civil War that sought to restrict the liberties of newly freed…

    • 1504 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    With the Emancipation Proclamation came the promise of freedom to previously slaved African Americans in southern states, and the Thirteenth Amendment emancipated all U.S. slaves all over the union. What this ultimately resulted in was the realization of what the northern African Americans had endured for years leading. They would come to learn that it was just as hard being a free man, living in an ever growing hostile white promoting land. How do you be free as a black man when all you knew is how to be bound? And for whites how do you accept the people you once owned as equals or close to…

    • 629 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Black Codes was passed during the reconstruction period after the civil war around the years of 1865 and 1866. The law purpose was to restrict the African Americans’ freedom and compelled them to work in labor economics for low wages and debt. Also, the Black Codes were part of a larger pattern in the southern white community. Not only were they trying to suppress the African Americans’ new freedom, they were trying to keep the maintenance of the system of White supremacy in…

    • 511 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Black slavery in the South created a bond among white Southerners and cast them in a common mold. Slavery was also the source of the South 's large agricultural wealth, which led to white people controlling a large black minority. Slavery also caused white Southerners to realize what might happen to them should they not protect their own personal liberties, which ironically included the liberty to enslave African Americans. Because slavery was so embedded in Southern life and customs, white leadership reacted to attacks on slavery after 1830 with an ever more defiant defense of the institution, which reinforced a growing sense among white Southerners that their values eventually divided them from their fellow citizens in the Union. The South of 1860 was uniformly committed to a single cash crop, cotton. During its reign, however, regional differences emerged between the Lower South, where the linkage between cotton and slavery as strong, and the Upper South, where slavery was relatively less important and the economy more diversified. Plantations were the leading economic institution in the Lower South. Planters were the most prestigious social group, and, though less than five percent of white families were in the planter class; they controlled more than forty percent of the slaves, cotton, and total agricultural wealth. Most had inherited or married into their wealth, but they could stay at the top of the South 's class structure only by continuing to profit from slave labor. Planters had the best land. The ownership of twenty or more slaves enabled planters to use a gang system to do both routine and specialized agricultural work, and also permitted a regimented pace of work that would have been impossible to impose in free agricultural workers. Teams of field hands were supervised by white overseers and black drivers, slaves selected for their management skills and agricultural knowledge.…

    • 1262 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Slavery DBQ

    • 689 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Slavery was a very unstable, fluctuating part of history. From 1775 to 1830, slavery was booming, while at the same time, plenty of slaves were freed. Although this statement seems paradoxical, it is entirely accurate. The reasons for this happening range from political manipulation to social typecasting. Not only are these reasons imperative, but understanding how enslaved and freed African Americans responded to what was happening around them is also important.…

    • 689 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Former slaves now had the power to be involved in politics, however, they were rising in power that led to opposing views of he whites. During the Reconstruction era, African American’s oppression to restricted political freedom challenged the norms of white society which led to violence to maintain white supremacy. During this period of time, former slave owners “…seem wholly unable to comprehend that freedom for the negro means the same thing as freedom for them” (Andrews). How can former slaves that never had a voice now be the ones making all the decisions?…

    • 707 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Throughout Reconstruction, southern whites felt constantly threatened by legislation providing rights for former slaves. The Civil Rights Bill of 1875 was the last rights bill passed by congress during reconstruction. It protected all Americans’ (including blacks) access to public accommodations such as trains. With the threat of complete equality constantly looming, violence toward former slaves gradually increased in the years following the Civil War. Beatings and murders were committed by organized groups like the Ku Klux Klan, out-of-control mobs, and individual white southern men. During Reconstruction, white southerners had limited governmental power, so they resorted to violence in order to control African-Americans. Although it is true that some whites embraced the prospect of a new interracial landscape for America, many more reacted with hostility. They feared social and political change, and were very uncomfortable with the fact that their old way of life seemed gone for good. Although there were many forms of massive resistance to the Civil Rights Movement and what it stood for, the impact of white resistance, both violent and nonviolent, on this period in America’s history is truly immeasurable. There are two scholarly works that not only trace the white resistance movement with historical accuracy, but also stress the plight that African Americans felt at this tumultuous time in history. The books that I am referring to are “Massive Resistance: The White Response to the Civil Rights Movement” by George Lewis, and “Rabble Rousers: The American Far Right in the Civil Rights Era” By Clive Webb. Although these works are both written about the same period in history, they depict much different points of view concerning white resistance and what brought it on. The “southern way of life” encompassed very distinct mixtures of economic, cultural, and social practices. Because of this, integration of African Americans into everyday life…

    • 1501 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    Slavery In South

    • 851 Words
    • 4 Pages

    A large proportion of whites in the South supported slavery even though less than a quarter of these whites actually owned slaves. They felt that slavery was a necessary evil and that it was an important southern institution. The slave population in 1800 was just under 900,000 slaves and of that only 36,000 of these slaves were in the northern states. In 1860 this number grew to almost 4 million slaves were in the southern states. Many important statesmen such as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington regarded slavery as a necessity even though it was evil. Individuals and groups of people of all sects defended slavery.…

    • 851 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Freedom In Louisiana

    • 879 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Freedom did not come easy for the former slaves of the United States of America. Racism was still highly prevalent in the process of ratifying the 13th Amendment and even more afterwards. Times were hard before they had a voice and only got harder after they were considered a part of the country. Former slaves had to defend themselves in order to survive in the country for the reason that no one else would. After the 13th Amendment was ratified on January 31, 1865, former slaves used political, social, and economic means to secure civil rights and economic power.…

    • 879 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Civil War Slavery

    • 597 Words
    • 3 Pages

    The American Civil War was one of the most defining moment in American history. It lasted from 1861 until 1865. Because the Northern and Southern states could not resolve their conflicts involving whether or not American would continue to be one of the largest slave-holding countries, it caused a division between the two. Along with the issue of slavery brought many economic and political disagreements that divided the states furthermore. Northern victory in the war preserved the United States as one nation and ended slavery that had divided the country from its beginning. These achievements came at the cost of 625,000 lives. That is nearly as many American soldiers as died in all the other wars in which this country has fought combined.…

    • 597 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays