At the end of the Civil War, former slaves rejoiced in their newly free status granted by the 13th Amendment. Yet, despite their freedom, these African Americans essentially held no means of beginning a new life off of their former owner’s plantations. However, newly freed African Americans sought to rebuild their lives post-slavery through the ownership of land, the ability to receive an education, mobility, suffrage, family reunification, and being self-sufficient. Land would allow for these men and women to grow their own crops to sell and eat, and an education would allow for them to be competent sellers in their respective markets. The ability to move not only gives them another point of self sufficiency in terms of find land or possibly
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In some cases, Apprentices, or those who were not going to be paid for their labor, were subject to such injustice in order to avoid violating Vagrancy laws which called for forced labor upon those who did not hold an occupation. The forced necessity of having a job or apprenticeship thus made African Americans accept no or incredibly low wages in order to avoid violating the Black Codes, which essentially then was a mere step up from slavery, and still left these former slaves wholly dependent on landowners. Most African Americans, who did not have the resources to purchase their own land and no longer owned land granted by Sherman’s Order, worked on the plantations owners by their former owners through sharecropping, and often times finding themselves indebted to such owners for equipment and supplies used to to grow crops on their land. Although compensated labor, and minimally so, former slaves were often so indebted to their former …show more content…
Groups which supported white supremacy, like the Ku Klux Klan and the Redshirts often terrorized African Americans in order to suppress the rise in power which African Americans found themselves gaining. In The Trouble They Seen: The Story of Reconstruction in the Words of African Americans, Dorothy Sterling shares that “between 1868 and 1871 [Ku Klux] Klansmen killed twenty thousand men, women, and children,” which highlights the true lack of power which African Americans held in the South. Losing Union troop protection in 1877, African Americans essentially lost their mobility and the right to suffrage simply due to
In some cases, Apprentices, or those who were not going to be paid for their labor, were subject to such injustice in order to avoid violating Vagrancy laws which called for forced labor upon those who did not hold an occupation. The forced necessity of having a job or apprenticeship thus made African Americans accept no or incredibly low wages in order to avoid violating the Black Codes, which essentially then was a mere step up from slavery, and still left these former slaves wholly dependent on landowners. Most African Americans, who did not have the resources to purchase their own land and no longer owned land granted by Sherman’s Order, worked on the plantations owners by their former owners through sharecropping, and often times finding themselves indebted to such owners for equipment and supplies used to to grow crops on their land. Although compensated labor, and minimally so, former slaves were often so indebted to their former …show more content…
Groups which supported white supremacy, like the Ku Klux Klan and the Redshirts often terrorized African Americans in order to suppress the rise in power which African Americans found themselves gaining. In The Trouble They Seen: The Story of Reconstruction in the Words of African Americans, Dorothy Sterling shares that “between 1868 and 1871 [Ku Klux] Klansmen killed twenty thousand men, women, and children,” which highlights the true lack of power which African Americans held in the South. Losing Union troop protection in 1877, African Americans essentially lost their mobility and the right to suffrage simply due to