Much of the history of the African Americans before the Civil War revolves around the issue of slavery. Even while the US had attempted to abolish slavery, it had resurrected by the time of the war and was institutionalized mostly in the south where the slaves were used as laborers on plantations. Therefore, the reconstruction efforts that followed the war were useful in changing the lives of the African Americans, primarily through granting them equal rights after their freedom from slavery. The former slaves were allowed to enroll in schools, engage in useful employment, and enter other trades that they had been barred from entering because of their servitude statuses.
The general notion that existed in the nation before the Civil War, the antebellum, was that the North was opposed to slavery and that they wanted the African Americans that had been enslaved to be freed. However, the most significant rivalry between the two regions lay in the economic and political issues of the nation by then. In specificity, the north had a diversified economy while the south was mostly agrarian, which means that they had different approaches to labor. The path to labor economics of the north was that of the free labor movement, which the Republican Party (Foner, 2011) primarily supported. Therefore, the North wanted a free labor approach because it favored their economic model and did not intend to stop slavery from any other perspective. This argument is evident in inaugural speech of President Lincoln in 1861 when he stated, “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery where it exists…,” (McPherson, 2003). Therefore, slavery continued to persist in the antebellum. The south considered the push to stop slavery as a planned coup de tat and they responded. Whereas slavery was one of the issues, it did not primarily fuel the battle that soon changed the statuses of the African Americans as described subsequently.
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The proclamation of emancipation in 1863 resulted in a release of Blacks within the rebel states while the completion of the battle emancipated all slaves in the US under the Thirteenth Amendment. Resultantly, a large number of African Americans in the south experienced the problem that their counterparts in the north had been experiencing, which was the fact that many Whites that were hostile towards them surrounded a free people. Therefore, as much as the African Americans were free, they did not know how to live in freedom and the Whites did not know how to live with free people around them (McPherson, 2003). Even following the proclamation of emancipation, the country did not have the preparedness to solve the issue of the citizenship of a large number of its freed population. Therefore, Congress implemented the reconstruction between 1866 and 1877 with the objective of reorganizing the south after the battle, providing approaches that would readmit them to the Union as well as setting the approach of having an inclusive society (Foner, 2011).
Teachers from the south and the north, schools, churches, and missionary organizations embarked on allowing the freed citizens to learn, and the former slaves seized the chance to become literate. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 that was supported by the Fifteenth, Fourteenth, and Thirteenth Amendments and it allowed the Blacks to enjoy periods during which they were free to vote, participate in active politics, obtain land from their former masters, seek employment, and utilize public accommodations (Foner, 2011). However, opponents of such progress wanted to erode the fruits that African Americans had gained, which included attempts to push them out of employment, especially in the north. This ill relationship resulted because the African Americans had embarked on a mass exodus from their former south to the rest of the country in states such as Kansas and others (McPherson, 2003).
While much went on from the war period to date, the most significant one was the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This Act was useful in ensuring that the employers allowed the Blacks and other minority groups equal rights at the workplace since it banned the discrimination against them. Much of the freedom that the African Americans experience presently dates back to the efforts of the ancestors in the 19th and 20th centuries. Therefore, the Civil War and the period after it changed the lives of the African Americans forever.
In summary, the most significant event after the Civil War was the abolishment of slavery, which had prevented the African Americans from accessing opportunities of self-advancement. Most importantly, the African Americans were freed from slavery, which allowed them equal rights with the Whites, a chance to obtain an education, own property, participate in politics, private businesses, and other opportunities that had remained out of their reach because of the discriminative policies that existed during the antebellum.
References
Foner, E. (2011). Reconstruction: America's unfinished revolution, 1863-1877 . Harper Collins.
McPherson, J. M. (2003). The illustrated battle cry of freedom: The Civil War era . Oxford University Press.
