Now, blacks were free after the war, slavery was outlawed, but it took a while for them to gain their full civil rights. The aforementioned “Jim Crow Laws”, were not broken down and outlawed until late in the 1900s. It took leaders like Martin Luther King Junior acting out for these things to come to the full attention of the government. It wasn’t until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that the Jim Crow Laws were overruled and full rights were given to all men and women, nearly 90 years after the end of Reconstruction, thus showing how Reconstruction was worse than slavery.
Next, during the Civil War, the land of the South had been torn apart, and the once agrarian Southern Economy seemed as though it would come to a halt. This did no last, however, as the industry of the North soon spread to the South. The South began creating factories for manufacturing textiles and the dispensation of tobacco, which meant that the South no longer had to export their cotton and tobacco, but could use it for their own purposes, to distribute it throughout the South. Sharecropping helped farmers maintain their farms (as slavery had been officially abolished), where Tenant Farmers would loan out their land, and the Sharecrop Farmers (who were usually formers slaves) would pay to farm the land, and only plant what the Land Owner’s told them, but would be able to sell or use what they farmed. Thus, former slaves, were still doing mostly the same things they had done before the Civil War and the South remained mostly agrarian.
Finally, during Reconstruction, the Government was in turmoil. President Abraham Lincoln was killed only five days after the surrender of the South and the end of the Civil War. Vice-President Andrew Johnson stepped in as the new president after Lincoln’s death, who was a democrat and very lenient in his reconstruction plans. The Radical Republicans thought that Lincoln, and now Johnson, were too lenient in their treatment of the South and plans for Reconstruction, they attempted to push through a Civil Rights Act, but Johnson vetoed the bill. During Reconstruction, groups such as the KKK scared blacks away from voting, thus Democrats in the South began to take power and soon took power in the House of Representatives. The Thirteenth Amendment was passed by congress in 1865 and outlawed slavery, thus coining the term, “Worse than Slavery” as there was nearly no slavery anywhere and the politics of this era, where no guaranteed rights for blacks were established, showed it to be exactly that, worse than slavery.
The Civil War split the country apart and issues such as slavery and civil rights pushed it near the brink of destruction. Freedmen were still oppressed and kept from gaining their full civil rights, coupled with the rise of white supremacist groups led to the continuation of ignorance, the return of the Southern economy to an agrarian one and the political turmoil that kept the country worse off and as famously said, worse than slavery.
Bibliography
Advanced Academics Site: roads.advanedacademics.com
Randy Golden; Georgia, the Confident Years.
Wikipedia; Jim Crow Laws, Reconstruction and White League. En.wikipedia.org
Streets, Heather: Martial races: the military, race and masculinity in British imperial culture 1857-1914. Manchester University Press, New York, NY, 2004.