Reconstruction From Slavery to Freedom:

Reconstruction

From Slavery to Freedom: The Struggle of Reconstruction

The Civil War was quite obviously a period of great unrest and political upheaval in the United States. Yet the period following the war's conclusion and the Union's victory, known as the Reconstruction, almost equaled -- if not surpassed -- the Civil War period in terms of political adjustments and major social changes. This was especially true for the population of newly freed slaves living in the South, many of whom found themselves without a place to live or a job with decent wages. In fact, many former slaves remained on the same plantations on which they had lived and worked during their oppression simply because they had nowhere else to go that could promise them any sort of employment or living situation. In addition, new laws and unofficial policies were formed that made it exceedingly difficult for former slaves to advance their socio-economic situation, creating problems that can be traced directly through the twentieth century and arguably even to our modern times.

This is not to suggest that the problem went unnoticed or even unpredicted during the time of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Certain provisions and preparations were made by the United States government even before the Civil War had officially ended to provide for the transition to freedom for the four million former slaves. The famous (or infamous) promise of "forty acres and a mule" was actually-based partially on truth; General Sherman's Special Field Order Number 15, issued on January 16, 1865, made available to former slaves four-hundred thousand acres of land used for growing rice that had been abandoned during the war (McElrath 2009). The mules came later, but were just as real. This promise, however, was unfulfilled for the vast majority of freed slaves. Other major issues, such as access to political power and education, were also addressed with markedly mixed levels of success.

The government department that was set up to take care of things such as the distribution of land, and providing more basic and immediate necessities to freed slaves such as medical care, food, and help with relocation and resettlement was known as the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, but came to be more commonly known as the Freedmen's Bureau (McElrath 2009). This federal office carried a great promise of fixing the social injustices that still marked the lives of African-Americans despite their having been officially freed. The Freedmen's Bureau was given the authority to set up schools, help find land and distribute it so that displaced former slaves had somewhere to go, and even attempted to help former slaves reunite with family members from whom they had been separated sometimes for many years (Sage 2007).

Such wide-ranging reform efforts and plans might seem to suggest that the Freemen's Bureau had a huge beneficial impact on the lives of former slaves during the Reconstruction. While it is true that this bureau did a fair amount of work initially in improving such conditions, the effects were not long lived nor nearly as effective as they had been hoped and expected by many, former slaves and white reformers alike (Sage 2007). The idea of Reconstruction was far from settled when the Bureau was set up, and Lincoln's assassination shortly thereafter caused even greater upheaval in Congress, making Reconstruction even more "up for grabs" than it had been since the war's inception (Sage 2007). Basically, though the Bureau was set up and certain other laws were passed that attempted to create opportunities for freed slaves, such measures lacked popular support in the South and the means for enforcement from the federal government, which was already stretched thin from the war (McElrath 2009).

The measures that did carry popular support, and so unfortunately became the true defining policies of the Reconstruction and the decades that followed, were the "black codes' passed in many Southern states. Though these codes were mainly a logical outgrowth of the institutional racism that had permitted the enslavement of people of color for several centuries, they were also fueled by the bitterness Southerners felt at losing the war and being forced to submit to laws imposed form an authority they had rejected (Sage 2007). These black codes, which developed into the later "Jim Crow" laws, were simply a way to make the racism and segregation that had existed during slavery an official part of state law (McElrath 2009).