preview

Reconstruction Chapter 15 Summary

Decent Essays

PDA (CHAPTER 15)
Reconstruction means the rebuilding of a shattered nation. Reconstruction is the era when the boundaries of American freedom was redefined. Slavery was removed. African-American were given right. Laws were written in favor of them for the first time. Black people were given as equal freedom as white people. White people had no one to work for them. Black people who used to work for them now had become their allies. Whereas for black people, churches and school were made for them, rules were being made for them, everything was on their favor. World was changing. It was changing into a better place. Reconstruction witnessed the stabilization of family life, freedom subtly altered relationship within the family.
Both black and white southerners reacted differently on this change. Henry Adams, an emancipated slave in Louisiana told his master, “If I cannot do like a white man, I am not free”, Black people seek for freedom as white people. They wanted freedom for their families. They wanted their families to be able to go to churches, schools. As Frederick Douglass put it, “Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot”. Black people were given right to vote. They were given full citizenship. Many former slaves insisted that through their unpaid labor, they had acquired a right to the land. The decision was made on their favor. A Georgia white girl wrote, “we are whipped, there is no doubt about it”.as journalist Sidney Andrews discovered, “the whites seem wholly unable to comprehend that freedom for the Negros means the same thing as freedom for them. They readily enough admit that the government has made him free, but appear to believe that they have the right to exercise the same old control”. This created problems. Still some white people wanted to control black people but this was not going to happen. The government itself and media on favor of black people. But as the black people were poor so they had to go back to work for white people, most of them with their ex-masters. According to law black people were free but they were still financially slaves of white people, but this system changed. New system of labor emerged in different regions of south.
In the free labor vision of

Get Access