Their goal was to abolish slavery completely and prevent it from harming many people. By sacrificing their lives into the war, this shows how devoted they are to putting an end to slavery even though the Reconstruction failed. The filmmakers’ goals when making this movie were to show how slavery was the reason why the Civil War was being fought. Throughout the movie, the African American soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry underwent harsh training as well as being treated unequally. They were used for manual labor and nothing else until Robert Gould Shaw stepped up for the soldiers to have them fight in the war.
Besides being just against slavery he was also fought for women’s rights. He thought that blacks should not be able to vote if the women could not either. Douglass believed that everyone’s input would be important, not just men. As the Civil War approached, Douglass felt that if the war was to end slavery then the black slaves should fight alongside the soldiers. When the war was over slavery was abolished but in the Presidential Election of 1864, Douglass did not support Lincoln because he felt that Lincoln was not enforcing that the blacks still could not vote, instead he supported John C. Fremont.
Lincoln (who strongly believed in the idea of the nation and the Union) being re-elected in 1864 shows how the soldiers supported Lincolns beliefs and believed the war and its sacrifices meaningful and necessary. The South believed their culture and values were so different from those of the North that they couldn’t live in the same nation so they created (or tried to) their own nation. Jefferson Davis said the main aim of this war was to
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.
There was a lot of pressure between the north and south. Just like any other large group of people, of course there were some disagreements, which is probably why the whole thing escalated the way it did. What one liked the other did not, for example, the confederate states (South) wanted to keep slavery around because it was very important to them and the union (North) did not find the need to keep it around. The emancipation of slaves depended on who won the war or not which caused more problems than expected. President Lincoln, just by going off of the fact that he asked the soldiers to only sign up for three months shows that he did not expect the war to last as long as it did.
New policies such as the Free Soil Appeal angered southerners because it limited the southern power in the federal government and sought to bar slavery in the new western territory. Slavery became very important in the south due to the expansion of farming lands plus an increase in the demand for cotton. This required the need for free labor or slave labor in order for the southerners to be able to afford such vast expansions. When considering all of the factors that caused the civil war Lincoln is only responsible for that cause in the event that he was elected President. There were many other causes that steered the country into a civil war including the fight between slave holding and non-slave states, the dispute between state versus federal rights, and economical and social differences between the two divisions none of which were Lincoln’s fault.
After 1869 federal government remained an obstacle throughout this time period. The Supreme Court ruling of the US vs Reese case in 1875 supported Kentucky officials who turned away black voters, and so marked the way for further discrimination against black voters. The voting qualifications further restricted African Americans from exercising their political rights and was legalised by the Mississippi vs Williams case. Federal government failed to discourage anti civil rights groups whose main targets were black voters and so greatly inhibited the slow progression of African American civil rights. However, state government was also a major obstacle in achieving the vote for African Americans.
At first the United States government was undecided about the use of black soldiers in the army and used them in demeaning tasks. Shaw was able to extort higher military officers to persuade them to use his regiment in combat at James Island, South Carolina, and Fort Wagner. His goal was to prove black men are as qualified as a white man on the battlefield. The film presented heroic
The fear of slave rebellion distracted both the Southern slaveholder and the Northern invader. The Confederate government never used them as soldiers, but it did make them go into labor brigades to build fortifications, dig latrines, and haul supplies. As the war went on, Southern manpower shortages became more of a problem. Slaves quickly took advantage of the situation, slowing down their pace of labor and not following orders, The South imposed a Cotton embargo and many Southerners believed they could persuade European intervention in the war by refusing to grow or give
After president Abraham Lincoln died and the failure of President Johnson, Congress tried to take responsibility of the plans to reconstruct the divided nation that they had before. The main point of reconstructing was to start and protect the citizenship rights of the freedmen. The Southerners were not happy about loosing their slaves and having rights equal to the slaves they used to own as property because of the freedmen’s. They did not want to receive the fact that the freedmen were now men, not just property and that their property was now their equal. The Southerners got up and were angry about the freedmen Congress that had to find a way to protect their rights.