The Broken Promise of Reconstruction & the Need for Restitution

When Reconstruction began in 1865, a broken America had just finished fighting the Civil War. In all respects, Reconstruction was a time period of

From 1865 to 1877, Reconstruction was on the forefront of challenges newly freed slaves and the federal government were facing in America. Reconstruction was both a success and a failure in many ways.

The Civil Rights Act of 1866 was designed to make the federal government responsible to enforce equal rights and nondiscrimination in public services for blacks. The brainchild of former abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. Sumner insisted that social inequality hampered the ability for freed slaves and other blacks to rise economically even though the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments had made all Americans free before the law, did not guarantee equal access to labor, education, housing and having the ability to vote.

The Civil war could very easily be known as one of the greatest tragedies in United States history. After the Civil War, the people of The United States had so much anger and hatred towards each other and the government that 11 Southern states seceded from the Nation and parted into two pieces. The Nation split into either the Northern abolitionist or the Southern planation farmers. The Reconstruction era was meant to be exactly how the name announces it to be. It was a time for the United States to fix the broken pieces the war had caused allowing the country to mend together and unite once again. The point of Reconstruction was to establish unity between the states and to also create and protect the civil rights of the former slaves.

In 1865 to 1877, a very important part of U.S. history took place, and that was Reconstruction, where every slave was freed, and the whites and black lived equally among one another. It wasn’t an easy breeze and took a long time for whites to accept blacks, and even in current day there are some problem with racism, the main focus was to get rid of slavery, and that was a success.

Just imagine that you were born when slavery was allowed in the United States. Better yet, imagine yourself as an African American/ black and being born into slavery. What would you do? Would you try to escape to freedom or remain a slave and serve “your master” until you die or until slavery is totally abolished? Well that’s when the Reconstruction Era comes in. The Civil War was a major cause that led to the Reconstruction Era. This was due to the Union winning the war between them and the South. The end of this war was thought to give freedom, peace, and stop the suffering of slaves all over the country, but the South didn’t want to let go of slavery that easily. Reconstruction was when the South was rebuilding and also when the country

An estimated seventeen million men, women, and children were enslaved and transported from Africa to the West Indies by Europeans between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Before these individuals became slaves, there were indentured servants. Between the colonial era and Revolutionary War many changes in the practice of labor were made. Expansion of slavery throughout America brought about different conditions of slave life and Paternalism. Slavery in America was very different before and after the year 1790; these changes greatly affected the conditions in which these individuals lived and are worth analyzing.

Indentured servants were used in early colonial times as a means of passage to the new world. The cash crops of the early settlers were exhaustingly labor intensive. In fact, U.S. History (2015) indicated that “the growth of tobacco, rice, and indigo and the plantation economy created a tremendous need for labor in Southern English America” (p. 1). The technology did not exist at the time for machinery that clears the ground and works the land as it does today. The work had to be done by hand; from clearing and prepping the fields to harvesting the crops, it was all manual labor for which the new land did not have ample supply of.

The Reconstruction “fixed” the United States after the civil war. It gave the Blacks more freedom then they ever had, it reunited the sides, and it proved to the other countries that United States could provide for itself without the assistance of others. Most importantly, it gave the country hope for the

In the years from 1600 to 1783 the thirteen colonies in North America were introduced to slavery and underwent the American Revolutionary War. Colonization of the New World by Europeans during the seventeenth century resulted in a great expansion of slavery, which later became the most common form of labor in the colonies. According to Peter Kolchin, modern Western slavery was a product of European expansion and was predominantly a system of labor. Even with the introduction of slavery to the New World, life still wasn’t as smooth as we may presume. Although the early American colonists found it perfectly fine to enslave an entire race of people, they

* From what I have learned from this class already this week is that the Radical Reconstruction was not as radical as it should have been. If President Lincoln would have lived longer after the Civil War the Reconstruction of the south Might have been handled better due to the fact that Lincoln could have handed it better than those that succeed him. With the intent of the Radical Reconstruction being to change the culture and in essence make the southern culture more like that of the culture of the north.

Capitalism was the sole purpose for being the cause of an exponential use of slaves in all aspects of production. Notably, it involved an economic system whose basis originates from private ownership of all the means of production as well as the production of goods and services majorly meant for profit. With characteristics such as accumulation of capital, labor, private property ownership, and competitive market. Therefore, there was a great need for means of production hence slavery. However, there is a close relationship between free and slave labor as used in production. The paper uses “Capitalism and Slavery” (William, 1961) as a primary source material to compare the profitability of free labor and slave labor through an in-depth discussion of the role the African slavery played in the development of capitalism in the New World. Free labor and slave labor both have profits in the production process and would be applied differently at various places. For instance, slave labor was profitable in activities in which little skills and versatility in production process were required. It is worth noting that, the use of slave labor to cultivate a fresh soil is more profitable than the use of free men in the cultivation of an exhausted land. However, the use of slave labor was the option at the earlier stages of development of colonies, although slaved labor was unskillful, given reluctantly, and lacks versatility (Eltis, 2000). Moreover, use of slave labor were not moral but

The changes in African life during the slave trade era form an important element in the economic and technological development of Africa. Although the Atlantic slave trade had a negative effect on both the economy and technology, it is important to understand that slavery was not a new concept to Africa. In fact, internal slavery existed in Africa for many years. Slaves included war captives, the kidnapped, adulterers, and other criminals and outcasts. However, the number of persons held in slavery in Africa, was very small, since no economic or social system had developed for exploiting them (Manning 97). The new system-Atlantic slave trade-became quite different from the early African slavery. The

Chattel slavery brought with it a series of revolts and revolutions. This was not surprising considering the conditions under which the enslaved Africans had to live. Africans were view as property and as such had no rights and could be murdered or raped without redress. It was no wonder that, the Caribbean sugar estate was the destruction of the identity of the enslaved person both mentally and physically. (Campbell 2010). The denigration of the enslaved was so much that revolts and rebellions were a constant throughout the enslaved period.