Civil War African Americans Analysis

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This author will be giving his perspective of African Americans as a news reporter writing a newspaper article or blog entry. The history of blacks in America is one of a continuing struggle to overcome and surpass all expectations in order that all the world will some day recognize that the United States of America will truly “rise or fall as one nation, as one people”. The enslavement of Africans began in the Americas in the early 1500s, with slaves arriving on Caribbean shores in the hands of Portuguese and Spanish slave traders. However, slaves did not come to North America until 1619, when a Dutch ship carrying 20 African slaves from the Caribbean landed in Jamestown, Virginia (Ciment 2001). The African population in the colony remained quite small for the…show more content…
A series of political arguments over the place of slavery in newly acquired territories and states had prompted several southern states to secede from the Union and form their own confederacy. On April 14, 1861, a barrage of artillery from the newly seceded Confederate forces against Union-held Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, officially began the Civil War. At the beginning of the war, many northerners were divided over its meaning. Abraham Lincoln (president of the Union), Democrats, and most moderate Republicans felt that the war’s primary purpose was to preserve the Union from division. Radical Republicans and abolitionists, on the other hand, felt the entire purpose of the war should be to permanently abolish slavery from the nation. As casualties mounted in the first year of the war, public opinion began to sway toward the side of abolitionism, and on September 22, 1862, Lincoln issued the historic Emancipation Proclamation, declaring all slaves in Confederate-held territories forever free as of January 1, 1863. When the Civil War ended with Union victory in 1865, it became the task of northern lawmakers to decide what to do with the decimated South and the millions of newly freed
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