What Really Happened During and After Reconstruction
Reconstruction, which was intended to transform the Southern United States and reintegrate them in the state system and society, started in 1865 with the end of the Civil War. The same year the Thirteenth Amendment was passed and ratified banning slavery from the United States for good. In subsequent years the Fourteenth and the Fifteenth amendments were meant to guarantee the freedmen equal rights under law (Cottin 14). Nevertheless, the truth is that this attempt to free the African Americans failed in more than one aspect and left them poor, unprotected and unwelcome anywhere. A Freedmen’s Bureau was established by the government to improve the conditions of these millions of people, who fled from the plantations but had nowhere to go. The Bureau supplied the freedmen with food, gave them housing, built schools and hospitals and offered legal assistance and help with finding lost relatives. However, the opposition of former Confederates resulted in Bureau lacking funds and personnel, and after seven years it was closed never being able to fully carry out its plans (Cottin 16). What is more, the promise to give each newly freed person 40 acres and a mule was never fulfilled (Cottin 18). Meanwhile in the South a variety of racist paramilitary organizations, such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camelia, Constitutional Union Guards, etc., arose to promote violence toward anyone who supported Reconstruction. They burned crops, assassinated people and oppressed them in many ways, and the troops were too scarce to prevent it (Cottin 21). Reconstruction ended with the Compromise of 1877 when the government agreed to pull the last troops out of the South. In the South two agricultural practices had established by then: sharecropping and tenant farming. The return for the most tenants and sharecroppers was so small that they “worked like slaves to survive” (Cottin 25). They had to buy things they needed on credit, but usually were not able to return it at the end of the season. As a result, they could not leave the landowner, as they owed him money. As Cottin puts it, this system “kept many in an endless cycle of debt and poverty” (25).
Works Cited
Cottin, Heather. The #7 Train Commuters History of the United States. Vol. 2, Freeport, …
