The Abolition of Slavery into the United States - Essay Example

?Life for African Americans in the United s after the abolition of slavery The end of the Civil War declared the US a new and wholly free nationin 1865 (Foner). The abolition of slavery with the end of the Civil War raised a range of complications for the African Americans. “In the 19th century people did not want to talk about it. Some did not care and abolitionists, when they saw so many freed people dying, feared that it proved true what some people said: that slaves were not able to exist on their own” (Downs cited in Harris). After the defeat of the Confederacy, the southern states faced economic and physical devastation. While millions of slaves got freedom legally, the political infrastructures of the southern states lost their legitimacy. Transformation of the South into a free labor economy and readmission of the southern states to the union imparted the need for reconstruction of the South. Freedom fight of the slaves in the post-Civil War and the Reconstruction Era transformed into a struggle for survival. Most of the slaves that had been withdrawn from the plantations were penniless. African Americans’ wages frequently fluctuated as a result of their perceived worth. Manual labor could be replaced easily in the post-Civil War era. There were only a few ex-slaves that had the kind of money to own a piece of land as a vast majority of the ex-slaves dealt with the issue of lack of source of income. As per the estimate of the 1880 Census, no more than 20 per cent of the African Americans were, in part, the owners of the land on which they farmed (“Being an African American”). Most of such holdings were also beset with debt that led to the crippling of the ex-slaves in the long run. For some, life at the time of slavery was better than after its abolishment because as slaves, they at least had some place to sleep and eat at that time. Sharing his views on the dark side of emancipation in the post-Civil War era, Johnson stated, “Since them times, a many a nigger has had it tough to make a livin’. I know dat is so, too, cause I has been all long dere” (Johnson). Ex-slaves saw immense poverty during the Reconstruction Era. Years of prevalence of poverty caused a lack of medical care and nourishment among the ex-slaves which resulted in a high rate of mortality among the African Americans in general and among their children in particular. Ex-slaves were under the burden of due medical bills and were still not able to access the required medical attention. Many started using herbal remedies to treat their illnesses. According to the Census of 1900, annual death rate of the African Americans was 30 in every 1,000 opposed to no more than 17 per 1,000 among the White Americans (“Being an African American”). 79 years old James Johnson, an ex-slave from Columbia noted that he “[felt] and [knew] dat de years after de war was worser than befo’” (Johnson). Although the slaves’ freedom was secured by The Emancipation Proclamation and victory of The Union, yet ex-slaves were not liberated under the Jim Crow Laws and segregation. Emancipation brought along with it new kinds of challenges, insecurities, and problems for the ex-slaves. Malnourishment and health deterioration were only some of the multitude of problems ex-slaves had to deal with in the post-Civil War era. A deep sense of isolation from their families weakened the ex-slaves emotionally and psychologically. This division was mainly caused by the sale of slaves, owners’ death, and presentation of the slaves in the pre-Civil War era as gifts from one owner to another. The slaves’ newly found freedom was dampened by loneliness and alienation. White Americans not only saw the African Americans as a nuisance upon normality but also as a potential risk to their dominance. “Our greatest danger is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands, and fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labour and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life....” (Washington). Such insecurities made the White Americans continue to make the ex-slaves work in order to attain freedom. Apprenticeship at that time, surfaced as a switch from the traditional slavery to a new more acceptable kind of labor, that took almost four years to last (Ingraham). The owners of plantations had to face different kinds of problems because of apprenticeship. Slave owners were habitual to making the slaves work continuously for extended periods of time. But the abolition of slavery deprived the slave owners of the right to make the slaves work continuously for eighteen hours. The new laws gave the apprentices the right to work up to forty hours in a week only. Emancipation also waived the rule of making the slaves work at night. The African Americans could now work up to five days a week and visit their own gardens in the off-days. The owners often overlooked the newly implemented laws and no efforts were made to alter the conditions on the plantations for the better on the part of the planters. The plantation owners also did not provide the sick with medicine, better food, or clothing. While the plantation owners received compensation after emancipation for their human property losses, ex-slaves were not given anything. Continuous abuse of the apprenticeship system by the planters paved way for the abolition of apprenticeship in 1837. With the decline in the sugar prices, compensation received by the plantation owners became too less to accommodate their needs. This, indirectly, made the circumstances more troublesome for the ex-slaves because the planters blamed ex-slaves for their financial losses rather than realizing their faults. They accused the ex-slaves of being lazy and non-productive. The reality was that the ex-slaves were expecting improvement in the working conditions prevailing in the old plantations, which not being granted, forced the ex-slaves to search for new ways of making money. A common perception among the Northern and the Southern White Americans was that ex-slaves would simply refuse to work. The White Americans noticed signs of shiftlessness in the ex-slaves attempts to scale the work back from slavery. The army, followed by the Freedman’s Bureau prioritized convincing the freedman to cultivate crops after returning to the plantations (Etcheson). Almost a third of the total population in the south comprised slaves by the year 1860, most of who worked upon the cotton plantations (“Life of a slave”). Almost 50 per cent of the plantations located in Jamaica had been winded up by 1860 (Ingraham). A vast majority of the plantations had been abandoned either wholly or in part. The property had also risen in price accordingly. The planters could not blame anyone for that but themselves. As the British sugar market was opened to the free trade, the surviving planters were compelled to sell their crops at a loss in the open market (Sherlock and Bennett). Ex-slaves discovered new means of earning. Most of them developed their own communities and villages. They started growing crops on their own and sold them in the markets. Some of the crops harvested by the ex-slaves included sugar cane, ginger, and bananas. This was obviously not acceptable to the plantation owners since the newly developed villages drew the labor away from the planters. In an attempt to deter the growing practices of self-farming among the ex-slaves, the plantation owners identified ways to tax some foods of the black man heavily. At the same time, the demand for prints, cottons, linens, shoes, bonnets, and beaver hats among the British and American goods grew rapidly. In spite of the placement of heavy taxes over the foreign goods, the ex-slaves were not ready to revert to the plantations. Such conflicting aspirations among the former masters and the ex-slaves prepared the grounds more a bitter struggle which convulsed the whole nation in general and the South in particular through the late 1870s. The result of that struggle reverberates in the history of the US to this day. The turmoil comprised heavy while paramilitary terror that not only evaluated the capacity and determination of the freed slaves to obtain their rights, but also the determination of the US federal government and the Republican Party to maintain the rights of the ex-slaves. In the late 1880s, the differences between the emancipation’s promise and the circumstances in front of the ex-slaves in the former slave South for those who had survived after the emancipation became overt and were disheartening. According to Du Bois, “The slaves went free…stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery” (Du Bois cited in Brown and Webb 150). While on one hand, ex-slaves were dealing with all the aforementioned challenges after the abolition of slavery in the US, on the other hand, labor experiences and opportunities also improved after emancipation in many ways. Before emancipation, it was fortunate for a slave to be able to live up to nine years after their capture. As slaves, they not only frequently suffered from diseases, but were also overloaded with work. Working the slaves to death only to replace them with new slaves was a more cost-effective option for the slave owners than to provide the slaves with food and rest and maintain them in good health to deter buying new slaves. Slave life over the plantation was no less than a torture. Many slaves were made to work in very hot tropical sun for more than twelve hours without a break (Hochschild 63). Sugar making that the slaves were involved in was a potentially dangerous process in addition to the fact that it required a lot of hard work. Sleep deprived slaves occasionally slept at work and risked severe injuries in the sugar mills. A visitor of plantation shared his experience of the way serious injuries were handled at the sugar mills, saying that if a slave’s arm or finger got caught in the sugar mill, the owners would make use of a hatchet “that was always ready to sever the whole limb, as the only means of saving the poor sufferer’s life!” (Hochschild 64). An in-depth analysis of the life of the African Americans in the US after the abolition of slavery leads to the conclusion that although life of the ex-slaves in the post-Civil War era was full of difficulties as they tried to merge into the society as free people with the White Americans, yet it was still better than what they were dealing with before as slaves. During the prevalence of slavery, slaves had no rights and did not even assume the basic status of human beings in terms of rights. After the abolition of slavery, ex-slaves had to fight a war with the White Americans whose interests in dominating the African Americans had been put at stake. Works Cited: “Being an African American after Emancipation.” The University of Richmond. 2009. Web. 20 Dec. 2013. . Brown, David, and Webb, Clive. Race in the American South: From Slavery to Civil Rights. Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Print. Etcheson, Nicole. “Reconstruction and the Making of a Free-Labor South.” Reviews in American History 37.2 (2009): 236-242. Foner, Eric. Give Me Liberty!: An American History: To 1877. W W Norton & Company Incorporated, 2012, Print. Harris, Paul. “How the end of slavery led to starvation and death for millions of black Americans.” The Guardian. 16 June 2012. Web. 20 Dec. 2013. . Hochschild, Adam. Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006. Print. Ingraham, Jim. “Labor in Jamaica after emancipation.” N.d. Web. 20 Dec. 2013. . Johnson, James. “Slave Narratives: Interview with James Johnson, 79 years old.” N.d. Web. 20 Dec. 2013. . “Life of a slave.” ThinkQuest. N.d. Web. 20 Dec. 2013. . Sherlock, Philip and Bennett, Hazel. The Story Of The Jamaican People. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1998. Print. Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery: An Autobiography. MobileReference, 2010. Print. Read More