RE


CONS Civil War and Reconstruction


Amendments: Between the 16th and 19th centuries, hundreds of thousands of Africans were shipped to the United States as slaves. As the U. S. continued to grow, there was a lot of disagreement between the North and the South regarding the moral and economic issues associated with slavery. Immediately after Abraham Lincoln became president in 1861, 11 Southern states, where slavery was still legal, seceded from the Union. The first shots of the Civil War were fired April 12, 1861. In the middle of the Civil War on January 1, 1963, President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation declaring all slaves in southern states free.


However, this changed very little for those African-Americans living in the South. It wasn‘t until the Civil War finally ended April 9, 1865 that former slaves were given rights through additions to the U.S. Constitution called the Reconstruction Amendments. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments guaranteed citizenship to all former slaves. Unfortunately, it was not as easy for the former slaves as these legal documents made it sound.


TRUCTION


Reconstruction refers to the time after the Civil War when the United States of America attempted to re-build economically and socially.


Life in the Reconstructed South: Racism and prejudice were ingrained in people‘s way of life and daily interactions. Rules such as the Jim Crow laws made it permissible to discriminate against African-Americans in transportation, education, accommodations, and courts.


In many ways African-Americans‘ quality of life did not improve once freed. The former slaves had rent and taxes to pay and very little money to live on. They were still, for the most part, uneducated and illiterate. Many only had the skills they learned on the plantations and there was still cotton to pick.


Most former slaves became share-croppers on the very land they once worked as slaves. Share- cropping meant the white landowner would divide up his land so each black family got a small portion to live on and work. In exchange for equipment and seed, the person share- cropping would give the landowner up to half of his crop. Other men and women continued being domestic help in white people‘s homes. In T


he Li e F es ttl ox , Addie & Cal are African-


American servants in the Hubbard household, and are likely the children of freed slaves, if not former slaves themselves.


A copy of the Emancipation Proclamation


White Landowner weighing share- croppers‘ cotton


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