...freed, was ratified by Congress in 1865. This was the 13th Amendment of the Constitution. Although the slaves were freed, they had no money, property, land, education or the right to vote. Freedmen were forced to become sharecroppers in order to earn money. They would rent land from plantation owners and were provided with basic housing. In return, they would share their crop with the landowner. They were forced to borrow money to buy seeds and tools and became enslaved by their debt. The sharecroppers' wages were very low and they often had to work for years or decades to pay off their debts. The southern states also had black men arrested and convicted for minor crimes, such as vagrancy or drunkenness. For many of them, the fine was too expensive and they would spend six months to a year in prison. Prison officials were paid for the labour and business were provided with cheap labour. Whites would whip blacks for indiscipline, send them back to their previous owners if they were thought to be vagrants, prevent them being witnesses in court and limit the areas where they could live. The Ku Klux Klan would terrorise, assault, and kill blacks for attempting to improve their lives....
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...Veer Shah AP United States History DBQ Essay #3: “American period between 1860-1880” The historic period prior to the 1860s was the most underlying era in American society as it led to the bloodiest war in the American history, the Civil war. Prior to the Civil war, the American politics were sectionally divided between the Northern Republicans and the Southern Democrats. The political culture was almost saturated as both sections had realized that the numerous compromises would only provoke questions and dissimilarities between them, with the largely interfered question of slavery and suffrage. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 had been implemented as a nationwide direction towards admitting states with reference the 36° 30´ latitude line, either as a free-state (above line) or as a slave state (below the line). Despite of the temporary success of the compromise of 1820, it was repealed by the Stephen A. Douglas in 1854 in his Kansas-Nebraska Act. Likewise, the Compromise of 1850, created by the Great Compromiser, Henry Clay, was an effort to preserve the Union by settling the issue of slavery in the newly acquired territories from the Mexican-American War. Although it assured a temporary peaceful settlement between the sections, it failed to give birth to the Civil war and the rise in sectionalism. Although all these compromises had served their desired intents, politically as well as socially, in turn, they only played a catalyst role in increasing the tensions...
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