Slavery In The Post-Civil War

The landowners took advantage of their tenants by overcharging for land and underpaying for the crops. The tenants began falling deeper into debt. They could not leave until they paid off their debt, which was nearly impossible. Although former slaves had been freed, they were still facing many struggles in free life. America’s plan for reconstruction had good intent, but did not give African Americans the equality they deserved.

Some slaves seeked free states, while others sought to remain by their family’s side, and those that did escape only took what they needed, not anything else if they had much

The primarily focus of this paper is to address the studies of the African-American views, conflict, and treatments from the Southern states following The Civil War. Documents include “Black Codes of the State of Mississippi” and the “Address of the Colored Convention to the People of Alabama”. These documents provide shaped rules, laws, and statutes for black society among whites. Between the years of, 1865 and 1867, both Alabama and Mississippi took action and state their thoughts towards the end of slavery in the United States.

  Although slavery had been outlawed by the Thirteenth Amendment, it continued in many southern states. In an effort to get around laws passed by Congress, southern states created black codes, which were discriminatory state laws which aimed to keep white supremacy in place. While the codes granted certain freedoms to African Americans, their primary purpose was to fulfill an important economic need in the postwar South. To maintain agricultural production, the South had relied on slaves to work the land. Black codes were restrictive laws designed to limit the freedom of African Americans and ensure their ties to the land.

I have nothing at all–no, not a shirt to my back but two rags.” Another account from a slave named William Henry Singleton, stated a similar experience. He told of his experience when he was sold to a new master. He said that “Of course I had hardly any clothes, but then I did not need many clothes to keep me warm.” Both of these experiences indicate that indentured servants and slaves did not own much.

The wealthy were in need of cheap labor, and with the amount of blacks being sentenced, most jails still functioning were overflowing with them. Leasing was designed for black convicts, and laws passed allowed towns and independent men to lease them for a price. They black convicts were put to work building railroads, levees or doing work for private owners. The convicts did work that free labor could not. Conditions were horrible and they were forced to work knee deep in muck, in malaria-ridden swamps, and to dynamite tunnels.

Slaveowners were able to keep every penny that they made from their slave’s labor because they did not have to pay a single penny to their slave. Also, the slaves were considered as their owner’s property, therefore the slaveowners were able to claim their slave’s offspring as slaves too. In the article “Did slavery make economic sense?” an anonymous author quotes Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, and they state, “[slavery is] generally a highly profitable investment which yielded rates of return that compared favourably with the most outstanding investment opportunities in

Chicago, Ill.: Historical Materialism, 2012.) The coercion Post references is debt amassed when a planter created and maintained a plantation. These planters did this by evading the loss of their land and their property, i.e. slaves by “protecting their position” in the global markets by using their cash crops: tobacco, sugar, rice, rice, coffee, indigo, and cotton through cost reduction. The power they had within the global economy was astounding, and they attained this power not with some old or

The first African American leaders in the South Came from the ranks of antebellum free blacks who were joint by norther blacks to support Reconstruction. Blanche K Bruce an ex slave established a school for freedmen and in 1874 he became Mississippi’s second black U.S. senator. African American speakers who were financed by the Republican Party, spread out into the plantation districts and recruited former slaves to take part in politics. In South Carolina, African Americans constituted a majority in the lower house of legislature in 1868. Over the reconstruction twenty African Americans served in state administrations as Governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, or lesser offices.

Slave owners felt that it was their responsibility and duty to dominate the “less fortunate and the less

Many were ignorant to the harsh truths which came with slavery; beginning with the common thought amongst slaveholders that their slaves were better off as servants than as free men because they provided for them. If they were to become free they would have less provisions available to them. Master St. Clare questions Tom on this subject, “‘Why, Tom, don’t you think, for your own part, you’ve been better off than to be free?’... ‘Mas’r’s been too good; but, Mas’r I’d rather have poor clothes, poor house, poor everything, and have ‘em mine, than have the best, and have ‘em any man’s else,’” (Stowe 182).

To keep this from happening farmers made the sharecroppers indebted to them keeping the sharecroppers from having any money to support themselves. As stated, sharecropping had drastic effects on the relationship between black people and white people. Examples of this are shown when the article states: “Well, I’ve had so much trouble with these black people, I’m going to employ white people” (Painter para. 13) Additionally, the overall actions between black and white people rose wages (Painter para.

Finally, at a late hour, they reach the quarters, sleepy and overcome with the long day's toil. All that is allowed them is corn and bacon, which is given out at the corn-crib and smoke-house every Sunday morning. Each one receives, as his weekly allowance, three and a half pounds of bacon, and corn enough to make a peck of meal. That is all.” This shows how slaves were forced into grueling labor without any proper compensation.

“Yes, sir, he gives me enough, such as it is.” The colonel, after ascertaining where the slave belonged, rode on; the man also went on about his business, not dreaming that he had been conversing with his master. He thought, said, and heard nothing more of the matter, until two or three weeks afterwards. The poor man was then informed by his overseer that, for having found fault with his master, he was now to be sold to a Georgia trader. He was immediately chained and handcuffed; and thus, without a moment’s warning, he was snatched away, and forever sundered, from his family and friends, by a hand more unrelenting than death.”

“The South grew, but it did not develop,” is the way one historian described the South during the beginning of the nineteenth century because it failed to move from an agrarian to an industrial economy. This was primarily due to the fact that the South’s agricultural economy was skyrocketing, which caused little incentive for ambitious capitalists to look elsewhere for profit. Slavery played a major role in the prosperity of the South’s economy, as well as impacting it politically and socially. However, despite the common assumption that the majority of whites in the South were slave owners, in actuality only a small minority of southern whites did in fact own slaves. With a population of just above 8 million, the number of slaveholders was only 383,637.