Life for Freed Slaves
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Before, during, and after the Civil War, conditions for non-slaves and freed African Americans were directly related to the status of the institution of slavery. So long as the majority of black people in the South were enslaved, many of those who were free prospered. During the war, following the Emancipation Proclamation, African Americans were in the unusual position of being technically free but, for the most part, having nowhere to go. Until the war ended, their economic survival often meant continuing their pre-war lives under only slightly different conditions--free, but still dependent. Reconstruction, which followed the war, was expected to change this situation. But, since Reconstruction finally offered almost no compensation to the freed slaves, their free labor and greater opportunities turned out to mean little at first. Life for freed slaves was far better than it had been, but was also far worse than expected. Yet, even though black labor achieved only relative freedom, black community began to grow in ways that had been nearly impossible under slavery. Free African Americans accounted for less than one percent of the black population of the Deep South States before the Civil War. Free blacks lived mostly in the cities and were usually unskilled workers. "The men were concentrated on the street-work gangs, wharves, and docks and the women worked as domestics or laundresses." In some of the more industrialized cities of the border states, free Afri
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ily reasons to do so. Slave owners understood the contradiction that this situation created, as the very property rights they were fighting to retain, were set aside by their own government. Even if they were perfectly willing to surrender horses or crops, they felt that impressment undermined the basic principle behind the war. By 1865, the Confederate Congress faced such a desperate military situation that it authorized the president to arm slaves in the army if he saw fit. Fortunately, however, the war ended "before slave soldiers could go into action," and, with the arrival of legal emancipation, all African Americans had to go into action.
Unfortunately, action was not an immediate possibility for most. The Southern economy had been totally destroyed by the war and opportunities for rebuilding were severely limited. The contemporary accounts of slave owners, as they gradually revealed the fact of legal emancipation to the freed slaves, testifies to the degree of self-delusion that remained. In one report from 1865, a planter's friends told him that few changes took place in black life. One said that "we expected them to go away or to demand wages or at least to give some sign that they knew they were free [but] we
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Some common words found in the essay are:
African Americans, Deep South, African American, Emancipation Proclamation, Confederate Army, Savannah Georgia, V Clayton, Confederate Congress, War Free, african americans, World War, freed slaves, black people, free blacks, documentary history reconstruction, gloucester massachusetts, history reconstruction, documentary history, peter smith, deep south, gloucester massachusetts peter, peter smith 1960, massachusetts peter smith, massachusetts peter, reconstruction ed walter,
Approximate Word count = 2831
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)
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