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