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Troppropping In Slavery

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As shown by Garrison Frazier, many freedmen saw freedom as the opportunity to live on the labours of their own land. In most cases, however, this never materialised, as neither the United States Government, nor the southern states gave any significant land reform. Although a few freedmen had obtained land with assistance from the Union army, or groups of soldiers had pooled resources to buy land, much of what was given to blacks and loyal whites (as in the Southern Homestead Act of 1866) was composed of poor soil, and few former slaves had the resources to survive until their crops came in. By the end of Reconstruction, barely any former slaves owned farms – without land reform, impediments to black landownership remained huge (Boyer & al, …show more content…

Under labour contracts in 1865-66, freedmen would receive wages, housing, food and clothing in exchange for fieldwork, however many freedmen disliked this system, likening it to slavery. Sharecropping emerged from a desire to own (or rent) land. Under this system conditions for black workers improved, as it represented a step towards independence, the share of the crop was far greater than that offered under their previous wages, and the risk of a shared crop was not only to the black worker, but to the plantation owner too. However, the relationship between landowner and sharecropper must be described as one of paternalism, one all too familiar to historians of the slave South (Ochiltree, 1998). Exacerbating the situation, a notoriously racist President, Andrew Johnson had been actively avoiding the Reconstruction issue of black rights, believing that African Americans had no roles to play in the era (Foner, 2008). Arousing the strongest opposition in Johnson’s reign were the Black Codes, a series of laws designed to control black life. And although former slaves were granted some rights - legal marriage, some access to the courts and property ownership (to an extent), but they imposed restrictions too, …show more content…

A vital step for the nation, the Fifteenth Amendment “marked the culmination of four decades of abolitionist agitation” (Foner, 2008). Somewhat oddly, despite African Americans being able to vote in some areas of the South after 1867, most Northern states had continued to deny this basic right (Costly, 2015), but the Fifteenth Amendment assured the end of

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