The civil war was started in 1861 which was caused by slavery. It was suppose to be a white man's war. White southerners would wage war to make the confederacy a seperate and independent nation free to promote slavery. As a result the white northerners took up arms to maintain the Union but not to free a single slave. The blacks has contributed a lot of work to gain their own freedom.
By the turn of the century, segregation was firmly in place, there was competition between the races and diminishing African American to second class citizens. Mays of the jobs that were available went to the whites and blacks that had skills or a profession they was generally used to serve black clients. African American they were barred from serving on juror duties and they got a much stronger punishment than the whites for the same crime. As the Jim Crow law made things harder to change so did social norms. Those living in the south always addressed white southerners as mister, miss, and ma’am even those who had no social norms.
Although many people believe that the civil war was only about slavery that is not totally true. The civil war was about many factors and issues that divided the North from the South. The civil war was fought between slave states and free states. For this reason it makes it seem as though it was a slavery war. The civil war created many economic downfalls for both the Union and Confederacy.
“Most of the Northerners did not doubt that black people were inferior to whites, but they did doubt the benevolence of slavery(civilwar).” Slavery was so cruel that many slaves had to figure out ways to escape it. For example, slaves would destroy farm machinery, fake sick and even commit murder but the most common act of the slaves was to runaway(civilwar). In the 1860s, the Civil War in America was the start of slavery becoming abolished. Slaves in the south escaped and went to the North, where Union generals made abolitionist policies. Many Northern abolitionists became aggressive.
Lincoln and congress knew that if they would have said the war was about freeing the slaves in the beginning that slave holder states that were still a part of the union would stop supporting the union. So after truly understanding what the slave meant to the Southern armies during this part of the war, they passed a confiscation act that declared all slaves that were being used by the armies would considered as contraband (USHistory.org, 2013). By passing this act this allowed any seizing of slaves used by the confederate army to not be returned to their master or the armies as long as they were in rebellion. This also pushed Lincoln and congress to the decision that the war was now about freeing the slaves. The next one was a publicized meeting with African American residents in Washington (USHistory.org, 2013).
Race has always been attached to history primarily to the person’s color and the relationship between race and their social status. Although there were many white Americans that welcome the idea of having African Americans as equals, others did not agree to the change. They let their ignorance, racism, and self-interest to continue and spread their ideas of racial division to everyone around them. However, governments in the south, where ninety percent of blacks lived, barred them of their constitutional rights through poll taxes, limitations on registration, and literacy tests. Southern state governments also created legislation that restricted and controlled the lives of the ex-slaves, known as the “Black Codes”.
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
Introduction At the end of the Civil War, America faced the difficult task of uniting not only two separated territories of the United States, but also two races long separated by racism and culture. Devastated and embittered by the damage of the war, the South had a long way to go in order to achieve true equality between the former slave owners and former slaves. The majority of the South remained set in racist behavior, finding post-Civil War legal loopholes to diminish African American rights (Tindall & Shi, 2010, pp. 757-758). Southerners continued to marginalize Blacks in their behavior toward ex-slaves and the later African American generation, continuing the escalation of racial tensions through white terror and discriminatory attitudes (Tindall & Shi, 2010, p. 759).
The KKK used brutal violence, black people were beaten, lynched, burned, shot or drowned. Employees of the Freedman’s Bureau and white northern teachers, who educated black people, were also threatened to be killed. The KKK was banned in 1872 but it continues illegally and was in fact popular. The problem was that many judges and policeman were often Klan members therefore made it difficult to stop the Klans
The grandpa clause was a way to allow white people to vote while stopping the black community from casting their votes. In the 1700s and 1800s there were several laws that supported slavery. The South Carolina Act of 1740 made it illegal to teach slaves reading and writing. It also made slave owners responsible for keeping slaves in control and from rebelling (Slavery in America, 2012). The South Carolina Act of 1740 was established after the Stono Rebellion in 1739.