Civil War And Reconstruction Essay Example for Free

Civil War And reconstructive memory EssayThe Civil War is the nigh widely written about event in American history and Reconstruction is the most mis-understood and least appreciated subject within this wider issue. intimately sight would prefer to escape into the heroic exploits of the battles that were fought than deal with the serious social problems that the former en knuckle d averd population had to deal with. I am passing gameing this essay since I believe that the African-Americans have been done a great ill turn by the dry land.As a people they were forcibly brought to this land, they were enslaved in an illegal and immoral system, and then they were abandoned by that same Nation ostensibly after(prenominal) having their freedom returned. What happened to them was non fair and there is a debt due to them. I hope to show in this paper some of the offenses that I find glaring. What was Reconstruction supposed to accomplish? Was it supposed to provide a new economi c start for the freed peoples? Was it supposed to rebuild and reorder the state governments that had seceded?Was it supposed to prosecute and gaol former Confederate officials? These questions were never fully answered, and for the most part they were never even adequately addressed. Liberals and African-Americans are more than sensitive to the burden of the unfulfilled covenant of Emancipation and Reconstruction, while so-called realists and conservatives proclaim that too much help has already been given (think Affirmative Action). The truth though, does not lie neatly in the middle between these extremes.Horrific treatment was an unpleasant fact for the enslaved peoples, and they were denied an equal opportunity to enter fully the American body politic. To make matters worse this bitter cup of denied citizenship is still too often a fact today. Recently, the folk singer Bob Dylan (Rolling Stone, Sept. 2012) has tell the country will never be able to rid itself of the shame o f being founded on the backs of slaves. I would like to rehearse some of the story of Slavery, some critical events in the war and afterwards, and to offer a reasonable suggestion for Restitution.The introduction of African Slavery to these shores was an unplanned event although the Spanish and the Portuguese had been involved with this trade for roughly 100 geezerhood in this hemisphere master copyly it appeared here. These are some of the highlights of that practice here The first African slaves were 19 people, who in 1619 were captured by Dutch sailors from Spanish slave traders. Subsequently they were sold to the colonists at Jamestown for food. Initially, these people worked as indentured servants precisely they ultimately gained their freedom after completing a work contract for the colonists. The phrasal idiom indentured servant is misleading in this case since its modern usage means someone who works for a fixed period and is then manumitted. This was not the arrangem ent that was applied to the African captives who arrived later than these initial individuals did, since the practice gradually evolved to treat the adults as well as the children of the female slaves as also enslaved people (partus sequitur ventrum)2.Another misleading statement is that the term servant was widely used in the South, even past 1865, to refer to African people who were actually enslaved. Therefore, not much credence should be put into the seemingly benign phrase of servant3 when applied to these unfortunate human beings. The cost of this labor was magnetic to the colonists since by 1638 an enslaved African laborer could be purchased for $27 while a European indentured servant cost a planter $255 for one twelvemonths work.4 The economic appeal of enslaved African laborers became the norm and quickly spread finishedout the colonies.After twenty years, ordinances legitimizing enslavement were commonplace in almost either colony and the practice had morphed into bonda ge for life, or more properly, chattel slavery. 5 These practices were immoral they had no place in a respectable society. The plaguey tendency to view the Africans through the white supremacist lens quickly became dominant and was a concomitant of this chattel slavery. This was punctuated by the knowledge that Europeans were never enslaved while most enslaved people were Africans. The skin color of the enslaved became a facile marker that fit in well with the culturally supremacist view of the European colonists.In this section I try to show how the African Slave System, after gaining a foothold went on to become the most important part of the economy of the new Nation As the profitability of the colonists agricultural enterprises quickly rose, it was essential to procure a sufficient number of workers since labor shortages were a constant headache. 7 Enslavement of the native Peoples had become steadily more problematic and by the 1750s this practice had ceased altogether. Europ ean workers were both expensive and tended to leave their employers to start plantations of their own, or to return home.Therefore, a more reliable source of economically viable labor became a necessity, and that baleful need coincided with the rise of the Trans- Atlantic Slave Trade from Africa. This phenomenon was heaviest during the 16th through the 19th centuries,9 when an estimated 11 million captives from Africa were ultimately landed at Western Hemispheric destinations out of 15 million who had been loaded onto these horror-filled ships. 0 The differences in these total were human beings who had died en route through miserable treatment meted out by the slave traders. The attrition rate during these voyages was a startling 0. 36 persons for every person who disembarked in the New World. We should not forget these stark truths. About 650,000 720,000 apprehended persons of the numbers shown above,11 it is thought, were brought into what was to become the United States. Employ ing the attrition rate noted before we can estimate that about 245,000 people were lost from the aggregate number of captives bound for these shores.Given the losses in the war that was to come its almost as though the Divine Being had decided to punish this country for these sins at a rate of troika-to-one. By 1860, the survivors had affixd through natural emersion to more than 4. 000,000 enslaved and freed peoples12 and were primarily located in the states that were to become part of the Confederacy (76% there and another 18% in the Border States13). What fueled this enormous increase in the numbers of the enslaved was that starting in the 1790s the revolution of the cotton gin and the corresponding leap in cotton exports demanded an exponential rise in subservient labor.So what had started as a straightforward small-scale agricultural experiment, primarily growing foodstuffs, had metastasized into an industrial system practically keeping the Nation purposeless with its lucrat ive revenues. Before the war began the cotton trade or more realistically King Cotton constituted 2/3 rds of the wealth of the Nation. 14 What motivated these slaveholders to import and retain so many African Laborers besides the economics? Evidently the lure of being a member of an aristocratic leisured-class was appealing.Most of the apologists for these slaveholders had classical education, and they employed arguments from Greek and Roman Antiquity, which portrayed slavery as a prominent component of the civilizing mission they were engaged in. Their lower income regional compatriots, although not slave owners themselves, were eager to emulate this conduct, which they viewed as valuable and status-filled. The Southern way of life was born it was profitable for the elite it was an identity vehicle for the lower classes but it was hellish for the enslaved.Further, it was built upon the most cruel and involuntary system imaginable which had as a mainstay the dissolution of the Afr icans families both here and in their original homelands. The American governmental establishment at all levels -bears the greatest guilt for this outrageous affront. It is important to recall that these slave traders and slaveholders were in many cases prominent members of the various(a) governments that acceded to or promoted this horrific conduct. The enslaved people, it should be remembered, did not voluntarily agree to be forcibly dragged to these shores.Despite the claims made by the Slavocracy that they were performing a civilizing mission by maintaining this obscene practice, the only positive good was that the lives of the slaveholders was being enhanced EXASPERATION After Slavery had become such an integral component of the Nation, regional differences in the attitudes towards that infernal system began to be felt all around. Exasperation was the order of the day but the African enslaved people were suffering the most There were three sets of players in this tragedy the Northern Whites the Southern Whites (slaveholders and on-slave holders) and the enslaved Africans. It is unequivocally true that the enslaved peoples did not create nor did they benefit from this monstrous catastrophe. The other groups however, either benefited in a ingest way or thought their social status was improved through the bacillus of racism. Exasperation however, was shared by all to some degree. The Northerners became progressively more dissatisfied with their impotence following the Revolution while the Southerners were increasingly anxious that the North was lining up new Free Soil states that would nullify their voter turnout majorities in Congress.The enslaved though, were in anguish since everything that people could cherish was systematically being denied to them after they had been wrenched away from their homes. The enslaved increasingly attempted to build an alternate life, sub-rosa as it were, by fleeing their masters or by engaging in sabotage or willful inco herence. 15 They also constructed a parallel universe of their own by founding separate places of worship (the Whites did not allow the enslaved to be an equal part of their devotional services) and their own systems of less-than-formal education. t was during this period that it could be said that a new genus was born the African American. What they did not have was any significant power over their futures except as ad hoc combinations that could be assembled, when conditions permitted. They expressed this through manifestations such as the Underground Railroad16 (which saw 6,000 30,000 African-American flee figures are imprecise), various slave rebellions (some bloody), and a general unwillingness to be smothered by enslavement (conduct just short of insurrection).Another group, though small in numbers, was the Free Blacks. These people became the vanguard of the African-American middle and captain classes that successfully operated between the seams of the larger society. The a ctions of this sub-group were able to relieve some of the pressures that had built up in the larger body of enslaved African-Americans and help to point the way for a more prosperous life for all.