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Southern Reconstruction The end of the Civil War was a real milestone in the history of the United States. Its main value was that it put the end to the most disgraceful phenomenon in the history of the mankind, a phenomenon called slavery. The end of the Civil War liberated four million of Southern Americans from the slavery. At the same time the gloomy times of the slavery did not end all of a sudden.
White Southerners were trying to control former slaves trying to work out new legal mechanisms to control their newly liberated co-citizens. At the same time the society did not pay too much attention to observe the needs of the newly emancipated black Americans. Congress created the Freedmen's Bureau just before the end of the Civil War. This Bureau was targeted to accommodate the former slaves to the new social realities.
It provided the former slaves with food and medical aid. It also established schools for the freedmen. By the 1870 more than a quarter million of black adults and children attended over 4, 000 newly established schools in the South. But that was not enough.
America faced serious political problems by the end of the Civil War. The nation was in fact divided and the main task of Administration was the consolidation of a nation, its reunification. The President Andrew Jackson who was a Southerner favored readmitting the Southern states into the Union as quickly as possible. He appointed the military governors who possessed the complete power in the former Confederate states until new civilian governments could be organized. The Freedmen's Bureau mentioned above was established to observe the civil rights of the black workers. It settled the disputes between the workers and their white employers; it tried to make sure that the former slaves received fair wages.
It was intended to interfere every time when the rights of the black workers were supposed to get violated. The policy of the Administration caused discontent of the white Southerners. They strived to restore their self-rule over their former slaves. The President Johnsons reconstruction plan was inconsequent. The newly liberated black Americans were not granted a right to vote.
There were a lot of laws which violated the rights of the freedmen. Thus in the South the free public education was created, but the public schools did not allow the black children to study free. The state legislatures passed the laws limiting the rights of the black Americans. These laws reflected those of colonial times. The liberated slaves could not vote, serve on juries, travel freely, or work in occupations of their choice. In 1865 The Mississippi and South Carolina Black Codes were introduced.
They were aimed to restrict the basic rights of the black Americans. They were violating the rights of the newly liberated slaves completely and caused a storm of protest among many Northerners. That was an attempt to restore slavery. In the South, the Mississippi and South Carolina Black Codes never went into effect. That was a real threat to the achievements of antislavery struggle. The Union military governors and the Freedmen's Bureau immediately declared these attempts to go back to gloomy slavery invalid and that was one of the most important victories of democracy.
In 1866 most of the states wrote the Black Codes that paid more attention to equality of the blacks and whites. There were other events that helped the reconstruction. The 14 th Amendment passed, and a new Congress hostile to the South was elected. This Congress was objected to reconstruction. When President Johnson vetoed the reconstruction legislation the Congress overrode his veto. The battles between Johnson and the Congress led to the first impeachment of a President in American history which took place in 1868.
Directed by the Congress most of the Southern states held new constitutional conventions in 186768. This time the newly liberated black Americans obtained the right to vote. The new state constitutions guaranteed the equal rights of the black and white Americans. The black Americans were granted the rights to vote and run for public office. Some black Americans succeeded to win the elections to Congress. By 1868 most of the state eliminated the remains of discriminatory laws.
By the 1877 the Reconstruction was finished. There were a number of factors which suspended the reconstruction. Most of them were in this or that measure understandable. The North lost the interest to establishing the equality in the South.
The general feeling of the nation that the reconstruction had failed did not benefit its further development. Such loss of interest to the further development of the reconstruction influenced the further development of the democratic processes in the American society. Southern states began trying to stop the black voting. The disgraceful Jim Crow laws accepted in the 1890 s made it illegal for blacks and whites to share the public facilities. That meant the racial segregation for a number of years until the prominent son of America Martin Luther King shared his dream of racial equality with the nation.
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Research essay sample on Blacks And Whites Freedmen Bureau
