Condition of African-Americans in the late nineteenth century Essay

Examine the condition of African-Americans in the late nineteenth century and explain why the Thirteenth Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Fifteenth Amendment, which were enacted to aid the new freedmen, actually did little. In the late nineteenth century after the civil war the U.S. was over, there were about 4 million people that were once slaves that were now set free. The big question for President Lincoln and the presidents that followed was what to do with them? Even though the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were passed to free and aid the freed slaves it actually did very little to help them at all because many other events that took place, which prevented them from working. The white southern government passed restrictive black codes, which was mostly just revised sections of the slave codes and replaced the word slaves with freedmen. The codes made former slaves carry passes, observe curfews, and live in housing provided by landowners. There were certain jobs that blacks still could not get into. Labor contracts even bounded the freed people to plantations and laws would punish anyone who tried to lure workers away from the plantations to other employment opportunities. Since most blacks lacked money to buy land many had to rent the land they worked. They had to rent land from white owners, which turned into sharecropping, where the black farmers kept some of their crop and gave the rest to the landowner for payment of the land. This ...