Essay
WGU C121 Task 3 - passed
- Course
- C121 Task 3 - Passed (C121)
- Institution
- Western Governers University
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C121 Task 3 SubmissionName: Jared Spaulding
Student ID: 010558753
3A(1):The end of the Civil War changed the lives of former slaves for the better but many found themselves still working the same fields they had before and during the war. Many former slaves immediately left the plantations and workhouses they had occupied for so long to find family or just move on, but even more understood that just because they were free from forced servitude, they would
have a near impossible time finding reliable and trustworthy employers. Those that chose the devil they knew and stayed on as laborers at their former master estates tried to at least find independent lodgings of their own and attempted to exert some control over the work requirements of their former master turned employer. Overtime the massive farms and plantations of the south could not afford maintenance of such large estates without a free labor source and the former master and landowners began to offer freedmen sharecropper contracts as opposed to paid labor. Under the sharecropper system, the freedmen would occupy and continue to work the land unpaid but would split the harvest with the landowner. On paper the scheme seemed fair. The land would be worked for profit still by unpaid labor, but now the laborers received significant portions of the proceeds of their work on the back end. Eventually though, the landowners and merchants formed a monopolistic hold over the agriculture markets and sharecropping became a new form of slavery where instead of a whip, you would be evicted or arrested if you weren’t able to sell your share of goods at a manipulated market to meet ever increasing debts. Debt became the new chains for many freedman sharecroppers. (Norton, 2015)
The sharecropper’s debt cycle was not the only measure white southerners took to try and bind freedmen back to their former masters. As Johnson did his best to mend the nation on a political level and curtail radical southern sentiments, his well know disdain for non-white Americans and disregard for
their wellbeing gave legitimacy to what became known as Black Codes. After losing the Civil War the south was required to rewrite their state constitutions and laws to state the illegality of forced servitude
and secession, but many simply reworded strict and punitive local statutes regarding the freedom of movement of slaves to now be tied to the employment of freedmen. Pre-war statutes that required slaves to have passes to be off work sites, live on their master’s property in provided housing, or observe
a curfew now replaced the word slave with freedman and suddenly black men and women found themselves in legal bondage to their “employers” virtually no different from their time as slaves. (Norton, 2015)
One major win for equality during reconstruction period that impacted the lives of freedmen was the ratification of the fourteenth amendment. The first section was of great import as it granted citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States” (Norton, 2015), a direct reversal of the first tenant of the Dread Scott decision. It also prohibited the abridgment of state’s constitutions that would deny the “privileges and immunities” that come with citizenship. The fourteenth amendment
assured all men of these rights but reassured the freedmen of the reconstruction era that a state was not allowed to take a person’s “life, liberty, or property without due process of law”. (Norton, 2015) This
in no way assured suffrage for freedmen but they now had constitutional rights as men born inside the boundaries of the United States. (Norton, 2015)
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