Groups During the Reconstruction Area

¶ … groups during the reconstruction area that particularly had tough times: Negroes of the Indian Territory and Colored Women. The passage of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 freed African-Americans in southern states. Following the Civil War, the Thirteenth Amendment liberated all slaves no matter where they lived. As a consequence, the experiences of people of African descent in the time that followed were difficult at the least.

Even following the Emancipation Proclamation, a couple additional years of war, service by troops of African-Americans, and the conquering of the Confederacy, the country was still not ready to address the issue of complete residency for the recently free black people. The Reconstruction put into practice by Congress, existed from 1866 to 1877, and was intended to reorganize the South following the Civil War. It provided the ways for readmitting states into the Union, and laying down the ways by which all people could live mutually in a non-slave culture. Those in the South thought Reconstruction was embarrassing and resented the obligation and thus did not embrace it (Hine, Hine and Harrold, 2002).

In a work by Ladd, Brashears and Coleman, Memorial from Negroes of Indian Territory, the plight of the Negroes that lived in Indian Territory is examined in great detail. The plight that these people faced after emancipation was anything but easy. Although freed from slavery by the result of the war, they enjoyed few, if any, of the benefits of freedom. They were deprived of every political right and were still under the power of their late masters. Not only did they have to fight the prejudices of the white man, but his particular group had to fight the Indians as well.

After some period of time had elapsed and the colored people did not see any benefits from the freedoms that they had supposedly been given they set out to bring their grievances to Congress. In 1869, the colored people who resided in the eastern portion of the Choctaw and Chickasaw country held a convention at Scullyville, near the western boundary of Arkansas, in order to take talk about their condition. At this convention they passed a number of resolutions. A convention to be held by the colored people of the western portion of the Territory, to take similar action in relation to their condition, was frustrated by the Indians, who threatened the life of any colored man who attempted to gather at the appointed place and time, tore down and damaged the printed posters that were placed as notice of the proposed convention, and had a leading colored man, on his way to the place of meeting, arrested (Ladd, Brashears and Coleman, ).

They brought their resolutions to the attention of Congress believing that they had the power and the will to remedy their grievances as well as the right to grant them relief. They trusted that Congress would give them their desired relief, and secure them the rights to which they believed they were entitled to them, as citizens of these United States, and as natives of the Indian Territory (Ladd, Brashears and Coleman, ).

They other group that faced quiet a bit of resistance was that of the colored women. In a work by Watkins Harper, Colored Women of America, the plight of colored women during this era was discussed in detail. The white and black women during this time period were constantly aggravated by the lack of backing for reprieve, land transformation, and compensations that they believed as just. This radical position was thwarted by a male biased society that dishonored female restructuring and tried to stop black reliance on the federal government. The women's visualization of liberty, turned out to be very different from that of the men's.

Black women played a vital role in Reconstruction. In numerous manners these militant women had further in common with their white equals than the freed women whose agony they wanted to alleviate. All through the Civil War, abolitionist and ex- slave Harriet Jacobs toiled personally with Julia Wilbur, a white reformer, to support the administration to significantly help slave immigrants. Their labors met substantial opposition from the military who dreaded the dependence of freed people. Yet abolitionist men, who had backed women's privileges, tried to limit female reformers. The Republican men perceived a chance to increase a new decorum and accomplished this by declaring manhood privileges and belittling female methods of reform (Watkins Harper, ).

The reconstruction of the south was the era all through and following the Civil War where quite a lot of different groups within the government attempted to resolve the financial, political, and community troubles that came about as a consequence of the Civil War. It was a point in time of disarray and disorder. Southern whites abandoned all types of equal opportunity and blacks sought nothing but complete liberty and land to call their own. This brought about numerous and unavoidable uprisings. Reconstruction existed from 1865 to 1877 and is considered to be one the most divisive times in the countries' history (Hine, Hine and Harrold, 2002).