What Did Freedom Mean Essay

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What Did Freedom Mean? A Freedmen's Bureau agent stands between white and black Southerners in this image. The artist illustrates here the role of the bureau in negotiation and credits agents with preventing a war between former slaves and slave owners. Notice how both groups are angry, yet the agent focuses his attention on the white Southerners. Whose rights were the priority of the Freedmen's Bureau? Library of Congress [LC-USZ62-105555] In the years following the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment, many formerly enslaved people embraced freedom. They left plantations to find spouses and children lost to them years earlier. Some walked off just to test that freedom was real, that they had the right to come and go as they…show more content…
They were Republicans, supporters of the party that wanted to see protection for African American rights. In several Southern states, African Americans dominated the voting population, even more so because Reconstruction disenfranchised former Confederates. Thus, the state legislatures of the South reflected these majorities. View this video to learn more about African Americans in politics. Republican Control of the South - Text Version After the Civil War, the Democratic Party's political control in the South was squashed by the emergence of a Republican majority, fueled by the votes of newly enfranchised African Americans. One plantation manager wrote, "You never saw a people more excited on the subject of politics than are the African Americans of the South." Many of the early African American political leaders were those who were educated before the war, such as Hiram Revels, a Methodist Minister and the first African American elected to the U.S. Senate. Within a few years there were former leaders and enslaved workers at all levels of Southern governing. Many southerners exaggerated that these Black Republicans were controlling the destiny of the South. Although this was far from the case, there was an African American majority in the state legislature of South Carolina for one legislative
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