The period following the Civil War was marked by slow change and failed reparations.
Freedmen were kept in slave-like conditions, and denied land of their own. Reconstruction amendments laid the necessary groundwork so that freedmen could play a functioning role in society and government.
David M. Oshinsky’s Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow
Justice provides insight into the conditions freedmen faced directly following emancipation.
Some were offered jobs at the plantation they already worked, but were then charged for rent and supplies to the point where they were practically working for free. Their freedom was only a technicality. Under this “new system,” freedmen were kept in a cycle of work-wage- pay rent-
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Others did not have the ability to do even that. Freedmen in secluded Mississippi plantations were not told about their freedom, citing beliefs of “emancipation to be illegal or immoral.” One freedman recounted hearing about emancipation and asked about his condition: “is dey?” Only to be answered with a resounding “No!” and threats of violence if he did not get back to work.
In his article “The Truth Behind ‘40 Acres and a Mule’,” Henry Louis Gates Jr. states that William T. Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15, issued reparations to former slaves in the form of “…not more than (40) acres of tillable ground.” With the mule added later. If this order would have come to fruition, many freed slaves would have had access to the economic mobility they were systematically denied through wage slavery. Instead, after President Lincoln’s assassination, Andrew Johnson annulled Sherman’s order and returned the land to its previous owners. Although emancipation gave freedom to slaves in states who were part of the confederacy, slavery was still legal in the union states. The thirteenth amendment sought to rectify that once and for all. The thirteenth amendment prohibited the enslavement of