Story of American Freedom Chapter 5 PDF

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Professor Jane Junn...

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Story of American Freedom Chapter 5 “A New birth of freedom” 95-113                          

Both sides fought the civil war in the name of freedom The south identified slavery as the cornerstone of the confederacy, while others in the south understood the conflict as a struggle for liberty For them, freedom was local self-government, economic self-sufficiency, security of property( including slaves) The purpose of the war before and after changed significantly during its course, in the north it was not always about destructing slavery until it was Lincoln wanted the new birth of freedom, honorable in what they give and what they preserve The two sides both fought for freedom but that meant different things to them: for the north it was for men to enjoy their own labor; mastership for the south After the civil war, African Americans became citizens And even though before Lincoln didn’t believe in African American suffrage, afterwards he was supportive But racism was definitely still around The civil war linked the progress of freedom to the power of the national government Liberty requires a country” “A man without a country”- an intense form of nationalism developed Lincoln went a little crazy with power and started imprisoning people who disliked the war The war inspired a shift from antebellum anti-intuitionalism, which saw the purification of the individual as the route to social change, to a state centered vision in which political power could be harnessed to social betterment Emancipation would remain a model for social change Similar to the American revolution, during the civil war religious and secular understandings of freedom were joined in a rhetoric of national destiny With the unions victory in the civil war, freedom truly defined the nations existence and a new nation emerged People saw free labor in the north and south in their visions The reality of emancipation posed freedom as a historical and substantive issue, rather than a philosophical or metaphorical one What was freedom? Was it simply the absence of slavery or was it something more For slaves freedom meant escaping slavery and collective empowerment- rights Frederick douglass said” blacks do not have freedom until they have the ballot” In the years following the civil war, blacks celebrated the fourth of July and whites did not Also crucial to the former slaves definition of freedom was economic autonomy: they wanted land Though the government had freed slaves, southern leaders sought to treat them as if nothing had happened at all “free, but only free to labor” Rejecting the idea that emancipation implied civil or political equality or economic opportunities, most southerners believed former slaves should still work on plantations

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During reconstruction by Andrew Johnson, he gave the south a hand in determining the contours of reconstruction- so the black codes were created, denying blacks equality before the law and political rights and forced on them year long labor contracts Thus the death of slavery did not automatically mean the birth of freedom But the black codes violated the free labor principles so much that the republican north clapped back The 13th amendment abolished slavery, but that’s all it did, no other forms of liberty In the wake of emancipation, the legal and patriotic doctrine of “free air” had at length come to the united states By 1866, a consensus in the republican party that civil equality was essential to freedom arrised So the civil rights act of 1866, declared all people born in the u.s.( except Indians) citizens and gave them rights like free labor and equality before the law But the 14th amendment fully gave equal rights to all americans The 15th amendment forbade the states from making race a qualification for voting Reconstruction authorized the federal government to override state laws And though blacks could now become citizens, America will still barring Asians from naturalization This period of reconstruction gave women the chance they needed to also secure their rights The largest womens organization of the late 19th c. was Womens Christian Temperance Union and rallied under the slogan “Home Protection”- wanted to ban liquor and wanted suffrage, but not divorce And those who wanted birth control were subject to legal prosecution( under Comstock law) Reconstruction did not do much to women freedom Congress was unsympathetic and said “reconstruction was the negroes hour”...