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Slaves forced to support the South, as part of their slave labor force.

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1. Did reconstruction make African American lives better or worse?

2. If you were a slave and you escaped would you join the Union army?

3. What were the slaves living conditions as they made their way over to America?

4. Were the living conditions of the slaves good or bad?

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Slaves were freed and joined the Union army to fight for other slaves to be freed.

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As the war started, many slaveholders prepared for a slave uprising. This caused plantation owners to start treating the slaves like, dogs. As Fountain Hughes said in the quote below. Fountain Hughes perfectly summed up how the slaves were being treated at the beginning of the war. As a slave himself, he offers an inside look of how the life of a slave was. Though the so anticipated uprising never happened, so the treatment stopped. As the war raged on, many male slaves were brought to the front lines, leaving the women with most of the agricultural work. The slave's day to day lives, would change based on male slaves forced to go fight in the war Many families were separated during the war. Though many families, closer to the union army, escaped to freedom.

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Lincoln's Freeing the slave speech

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Northern states hated slavery and wrote about it in News letters.

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A radical white-supremacy group that would terrorize African Americans

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“...with growing exploitation, until they fought slavery to save democracy and then lost democracy in a new and vaster slavery.”

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"For we colored people did not know how to be free and the white people did not know how to have a free colored person about them."

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After the Civil War, many Southern whites were unhappy about getting rid of there slaves. In order to show the slaves who had power they would burn down there houses.

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A slave standing outside his house. In the building there is many holes and cracks that rain or wind could go through.

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The Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 freed African Americans in rebel states, and after the Civil War, the Thirteenth Amendment emancipated all U.S. slaves wherever they were. As a result, the mass of Southern blacks now faced the difficulty Northern blacks had confronted--that of a free people surrounded by many hostile whites. After the Civil War, with the protection of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, African Americans enjoyed a period when they were allowed to vote, actively participate in the political process, acquire the land of former owners, seek their own employment, and use public accommodations. As the violence towards African Americans increased in the South, they became much less likely to not take the opportunity to vote or run in elections, which further destabilized the basic foundation of power that had just been established with the beginning of Reconstruction. With the  privileges the African american, they came with disadvantages. Racism and the Ku Klux Klan, an extremist group that believed in white supremacy, whit nationalism, anti-immigration, and, especially in later iterations, anti-Catholicism, and antisemitism. Living conditions were much better, African Americans lived in small houses but were easily "booted" out by radical Southeners.

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Slaves sitting outside of there house. Many slaves had one pair of clothes and they were usually run down

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The period after the Civil War, 1865 - 1877, was called the Reconstruction period. Abraham Lincoln started planning for the reconstruction of the South during the Civil War as Union soldiers occupied huge areas of the South.

www.howard.edu/library/reference/guides/reconstructionera

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Slaves were forced into small huts with there whole families.  The huts were nothing more then protection from the elements.  There was only dirt floors and they all had little to no furniture in them.  They would get three meals a day though.  Morning meals were very light rations at the home.  An afternoon meal was served by older slaves in a central pavilion and again rations were very small.  The dinner meal had the most rations and were served in the house by the women.  If a slave was caught stealing food from the house the owner would make sure that they knew it wasn't right.  The quote describes that the houses were really just shacks.  They were not anything special and they even had many holes in them.  She also states that they weren't well kept to show how it was just a shack.

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We had old ragged huts made out of poles, and some of de cracks chinked up wid mud and moss and some of dem wasn’t. We didn’ have no good beds, jes’ scaffolds nailed up to de wall out of poles and de ole ragged buddin’ throwed on dem. Dat sho’ was hard sleepin’ but even dat feel good to our weary bones after dem long hard days work in de field. —Jenny Proctor (ex-slave, Texas)

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During Civil War

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"You wasn't no more than a dog to some of them in them days. You wasn't treated as good as they treat dogs now. But still I didn't like to talk about it. Because it makes, makes people feel bad you know. Uh, I, I could say a whole lot I don't like to say. And I won't say a whole lot more."

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/voices/vfssp.html

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Post-Civil War

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Pre-Civil War