Changes Of American Black’s Social Status In The South Before And After The Civil War

During the antebellum period, the slave codes accompanied the expansion of slavery into the Lower South and the Gulf Coast states in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Most of these laws express the same viewpoint:that slaves are not people but property and that laws should protect the ownership of such property and should also protect whites against any danger that might arise from the presence of large numbers of slaves. After the war, black and white abolitionists supported the enfranchisement of black men on the basis of black soldiers’defense of the Union. In that circumstance, the Fourteenth Amendment to the federal Constitution which gave blacks citizenships and promised them equal protection of the laws, and the Fifteenth Amendment gave them the right to vote.The release from bondage of4million persons had serious implications for economic structure of the South. The freedpeople rejected the gang-labor system as reminiscence of slavery, preferring instead to work in kin groups, known as the "squad system" and a harbinger of sharecropping. The price system proved unattractive to the freedpeople because the white planters were anxious to secure labor at the lowest possible price.Based on the research, the paper draws a conclusion that after the Reconstruction, in spite of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the Negroes were denied equal civil and political rights. In the rural South the basic socioeconomic pattern was not destroyed, for share-cropping replaced the antebellum slave-plantation system. Most of the upper-class large landowners survived the ordeal of war and reconstruction, and the mass of ex-slaves remained a dependent, propertyless peasantry...