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Failure Of Reconstruction

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Words 843
Pages 4
Tabarak Foaad
Professor Jay Smith
AMH2020
The Failure of Reconstruction
05 July 2017
Slavery by Another Name
Two years prior to the end of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction in 1863, plotting out the first initiatives to reinstate the union. After the end of the war and the assassination of President Lincoln in 1865, President Andrew Johnson adopted Lincoln’s most substantial strategies including his 10 Percent Plan which required 10 percent of each southern state’s population to pledge loyalty to the United States to be restored to the Union. However, Radical Republicans in Congress argued for more strict procedures. The one key point that the two presidents and Congress agreed on …show more content…
In their book, In Search of the Promised Land, John Hope Franklin, and Loren Schweninger put together the archives of a slave family in the old south-Sally Thomas’s descendants. Sally, a dependent slave mother of three boys, dedicated her life to free her slave-born sons and to provide them with opportunities of freedom, travel, and education. She instilled the importance of education into her sons and their forthcoming generations. While former slaves in southern states hoped for the chance of education, they were very limited with laws such as the Anti-Literacy law that prohibited teaching blacks to read or write. According to Franklin and Schweninger, John H. Rapier Sr. (1808-1869), Sally’s eldest son, “…placed such a high value on education, given his own limited schooling” (Franklin and Schweninger 130). Following the death of his wife and the scattering of his children, Rapier Sr. started a second family with Lucretia in Alabama. She was his slave housekeeper who gave birth to five of his children: Rebecca, Joseph, Thomas, Charles, and Susan. They were all born into slavery due to her legal status. Cherishing education, “he did break the law by teaching Rebecca and Joseph to read and write, and could have been subject to a heavy fine for this...” (Franklin and Schweninger 134). Such legal subjections in Alabama and other southern states demonstrate a failure in the

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