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Misunderstanding Of Slavery

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Many masters believed in the stereotype of slaves being these “...cheerful and ignorantly content...” (Davidson and Lytle 176) creatures who would accept anything their masters tell them. When masters saw their slaves dancing in joy at the sound of Union gunshots, they felt inspired because they believed the slaves were just happy and ignorant of the gunshots. This ties into the theme of deception and the masters’ inability to see through the guise of their slaves. Because most slaves refused to open up to their masters, they were often quite hard to read and left their masters with a false sense of superiority. Some may argue that white northerners would do a good job recording the history of blacks, but this is untrue. There was plenty of racism in the North. Political parties like the Know Nothing Party and events like minstrel shows that made fun of blacks and reinforced negative stereotypes prove this. Whites and blacks in the North were actually more segregated than whites and blacks in the South. Many Union soldiers believed that they were fighting a war to preserve the Union, not end slavery. This was President Lincoln’s focus up until had the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, which turned the war into a moral conflict over slavery. When free blacks were allowed into the Union army, …show more content…

The racial prejudices of both whites and blacks made it impossible for one to deal with the other sincerely and with complete mutual understanding. Blacks and whites were very divided after the Civil War, in fact, the two ethnic groups were divided in many areas until 1968. Their differences in culture, tradition, religion, and dialect made it so whites and blacks could never see

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