How Free Were The American People After The War Against Slavery

How Free Were the American People After the War Against Slavery (1861-1865) and the Ensuing Era of Reconstruction (1868-1877?)
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How Free Were the American People After the War Against Slavery (1861-1865) and the Ensuing Era of Reconstruction (1868-1877?)
Introduction
During a two-year world tour in 1877, Ulysses S. Grant, the retiring president of the United States was greeted with reverence at every point he stopped. As the primary architect of the American Civil War, Grant was treated as a military genius whose efforts had saved the United States’ millions of slaves (Foner, 2018). The 13th Amendment of 1865 saw the end of slavery and this meant the beginning of the newfound freedom for the blacks. During the Reconstruction period, about 2000 African Americans worked in government agencies (Khan Academy, 2018). The black church, the black family, and education later formed the central elements of African Americans following emancipation. In the South, lives underwent a major transformation free from sexual assaults, forcible relocation, and selling of friends and family members, and a denial of education. African Americans were for the first time permitted to have legal marriages, work for wages, and own homes. Although the period after the civil war and emancipation saw the end of slavery, the white race treated the blacks with prejudices and brutalities against the African Americans persisted (Khan Academy, 2018). This paper presents an argument that while most African Americans celebrated this freedom in private and public gatherings, life after slavery and the ensuing reconstruction proved to be difficult and it is often argued that the blacks were not totally free.
Definition of Freedom
The Oxford University Press (2018) defines freedom as a state of not being enslaved or imprisoned. This implies that people with freedom have the power and right to think, speak, and act as they would wish. Freedom is synonymous to liberty, emancipation, liberation, or deliverance. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines freedom as the state of an individual being free or the absence of constraint or coercion in action or choice (Merriam-Webster, 2018).
Americans Were Not Free After the Civil War
Although the Black Codes, laws instituted by the government at the South, granted the blacks some legal rights to marry, sue in court, and own their own property, the same laws made it illegal for African Americans to testify against whites, serve in courts or in state militias. These laws also demanded that the black tenant farmers and sharecroppers sign yearly contracts, failure to which they could face arrest or get hired out for labor. A majority of black Americans in the south lived in abject rural poverty. This population suffered most as they had been denied wages and education during the years of slavery. Ex-slaves were often forced to rent lands from their white slave owners due to the prevailing economic conditions. The sharecroppers could pay rent on the land given by the whites by surrendering a portion of their produce to the owners of the land. In some areas, the former slaves in the South managed to seize land from their former slave owners ...