Despite outlawing slavery, affording citizenship and voting rights to African-Americans with the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, Congress did not implement lasting protections of their rights, nor did it find a way to ensure that African-Americans owned land.
After Republicans agreed to remove the military from the South in the Compromise of 1877, that allowed the mostly white Democrat-controlled governments of the South to continue to restrict the rights of African Americans. That meant the rise of Jim Crow laws, grandfather clauses, and poll taxes. This was a time when "separate-but-equal" was ruled as constitutional by the Supreme Court in Plessy vs. Ferguson.
Without land they would have to be dependent on their former slave masters for a means of survival.
According to an elderly African-American man who was interviewed around the 1930s about his life before and after the Civil War, he says:
Freedom wasn't no different I knows of. I works for Marse John just the same for a long time. He say one morning, "John, you can go out in the field iffen you wants to or you can get out iffen you wants to, 'cause the government say you is free. If you wants to work I'll feed you and give you clothes but can't pay you no money. I ain't got none." Humph, I didn't know nothing what money was, nohow, but I knows I'll git plenty victuals to eat, so I stays ... (1)
While some may have fled to cities in the North to seek other opportunities, those in the South would likely see their standard of living unchanged and preserved with the sharecropping system that kept them in long-standing debt.
African-Americans may have enjoyed some freedoms but their sense of equality with other American citizens was still deeply undermined politically, legally, socially and economically.
Let me know if you have any questions or would like a tutoring session for further assistance.
References:
- (Benjamin Botkin, ed., Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery, University of Chicago Press, 1945,p. 238.)
