Summary In The View From The Bottom Rail

In 1640, A black indentured servant, and two white indentured servants escaped from their master. The three servants were eventually captured, convicted, and sentenced. The white servants had their indentured contracts extended by four years. This was common for white servants that did something like this. The black servant has a much harsher sentencing, he had to serve the rest of his life as an indentured servant.

Abraham Lincoln, who is widely known as an advocator against slavery, was, in the beginning, not strongly one way or another. He said, that, “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not to save or destroy slavery” (Doc. 10). His opinion later changed when he got a visit from Fredrick Douglas and he because a pro-abolitionist. After the civil war ended, all freed men were supposed to be given 40 acres of land, taken from the chief rebels but things got complicated, and most rebels were forgiven, and given their land back (Doc. 2). African Americans were not the only ones fighting for their equality.

After the Civil War, African Americans went from bondage into gaining liberty. Twentieth President James A. Garfield stated, “The elevation of the Negro race from slavery to the full rights of citizenship is the most important political change we have known since the adoption of the constitution.” However, the centuries of racism, prejudice, and devaluation took its toll on Southern society, and they would take another century before all Blacks could vote unhindered. The ratification of civil rights legislation created only a beginning of a change because the Emancipation Proclamation failed to free all slaves, Whites did not view Blacks as social equals, and most Southern Whites would not cooperate with the new laws. The Emancipation

[Doc. 7 ] This lead to the ratification of 15th Amendment. The 15th Amendment protects the right to vote of the emancipated slaves as it says on the document, “the right to vote shall not be denied on the basis of race, color, or previous condition.” The aftermath of civil war, resulted with good economical changes.

During that time, African Americans were not entirely free with all of their desired rights, as they still did not have complete political, economic, and social rights. Back then, African Americans did not have wholesome political rights. According to document A which shows the voting and jury rights of blacks in the north of 1860, only a few states, the New England states, had rights to suffrage. And this was only the male population of the New England region. And of that region, only one state, Massachusetts had jury rights, and that was only gained in 1860.

Frederick Douglass was a slave around the 1800s. Since he was able to escape slavery and gain freedom, Douglass decided to write an autobiography called, The Narrative of Frederick Douglass. Douglass also had a special feature most slaves did not have: he knew how to read. In the story, Douglass recalled his first master sending him to live with Hugh Auld, a relative of his first master.

It was meant to fight against slave owners but not against slavery. President Lincoln knew he did not have the power to end slavery because of how evil it was, but he believes he could end it to keep the Union going. He read the Emancipation Proclamation at the battle of Antietam where the Union had taken the victory. The Proclamation warned all of the Confederacy to surrender or their slaves would be freed. On January 1,1863, he issued the final Emancipation Proclamation.

Truthfully, it was a complete failure. The nation came to compromises on matters such as education and the economy, but in a bigger picture, racism was still an enormous and unacceptable issue. Since slavery was abolished, African Americans attained a more unfair version of freedom. They needed to make an income, find shelter, and gain experience in the world, so many freed slaves became sharecroppers. Sharecroppers farmed on land they rented from a landlord, in exchange for a share of the crop they produced.

They repeatedly pointed out the disagreement between American ideals of liberty and equality and the base reality of slavery. President Thomas Jefferson recognized that the Virginian slaves had been motivated by the same ideals that had inspired white colonists to revolt against Britain. Jefferson told the minister to assure the British that the rebel slaves were not criminals, but men aspiring for freedom. The negotiations with the British were unsuccessful, and most of the accused conspirators were sold as slaves to Spain and Portugal 's New World colonies.

When slavery was legal in the United States, many people did not know how cruelly the slaves were treated in the south. This changed when writers like Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave, wrote about how they were treated. Frederick wrote about his time as a slave in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. [something about slave owners power] The slave owners’ methods of maintaining power over their slaves were to disgust them with freedom, the violence that they were constantly exposed to, and their lack of education.

To buy a passage aboard a ship to America an immigrant had to pay about a year’s worth of wages or they could trade their servitude for the trip. Many people wanted to come to the New World because they made more

This essay discusses black people in the 1900s and their thoughts on The Great Migration. Slaves had just been emancipated, however 64 years later the struggle for survival didn’t get any easier for them. Blacks in the south was drowning, and barely maintaining. Blacks in the north however, were doing more decent then people in the south. It was easier for northerner to get a job and afford education, southerners on the other hand could not, and in fact they work more in fight to live than survive.

Robert strategically planned his escape one night when he and the rest of the slaves were left to watch over the planter. Many slaves were scared of the repercussions if caught. Robert had nothing to lose, his freedom meant more than his life. The mission

Observably, the Jim Crow laws passed by southern states effectively disfranchised African-Americans from the late nineteenth century until well into the 20th century. In the ongoing of Reconstruction, after the Civil War, African Americans in the south briefly enjoyed voting privileges because they felt nearly equal to whites. However, around 1890, legally sanctioned disfranchisement occurred abruptly. For example, during the years’ right after the Civil War, African Americans made up as much as forty-four percent of the registered electorate in Louisiana, but by 1920, they constituted only 1 percent of the electorate. In Mississippi, almost seventy percent of eligible African Americans were registered to vote in 1867 and after 1890, less than six percent were eligible to vote.

During the Revolutionary War and after the war ended, slavery was still occurring and very popular according to a map adopted from North of Slavery (Leon F. Litwack). The map depicts which states of America, north or south, abolished slavery versus states who continued using the method of slavery. After the war ended in 1783, many slaves were still working and not have been freed. By 1786, the northern states had freed the slaves, while the slaves in the south were not free until 1863 due to the Emancipation Proclamation. The time difference of the release of slaves in the north compared to the south is precisely 77 years.