Though I realize the Emancipation Proclamation did not liberate America’s slaves, what is fuzzy to me are the processes that actually freed them after the Civil War. Did many slave owners turn a deaf ear and blind eye to President Johnson’s decree and keep their slaves in isolated submission?
I understand that many freed slaves were immediately forced into sharecropping just to exist and that the KKK soon emerged as a terror group after the Civil War.
But by what mechanism were slaves on thousands of farms, large and small, informed of their new-found freedom? And who (the U.S. military, presumably) was responsible for liberating and nominally protecting these former slaves during America’s reconstruction?
I’m not sure what decree of President Johnson you’re referring to. President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation effective January 1, 1863. As you note, it only applied to states and areas of states that were in rebellion at that time.
Full emancipation throughout the U.S. took place with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, which came into force on December 18, 1865, following ratification by the states.
Another note: circumstances differ, but this selection of online slave narratives details how many actual slaves learned of their emancipation, and you can read them for yourself. In some cases they learned of their freedom furtively, or a big announcement was made by the master or overseer, or they found out when their owners fled and Union troops shortly swarmed the plantations.
I assume what he meant by that comment is that the suddenly-freed slaves had no money, no property, no farm land, no livelihood. To live, they ended up having to work for the whites who did have these, under terms that weren’t particularly advantageous, and they didn’t have a lot of choice about it.
Precisely. Conditions were so hostile, so stacked against the suddenly “emancipated” slaves–a term I use loosely–that their only choice was no choice at all. Freedom or not, it seems they were shackled to the land, but that’s veering into GD/IMHO territory.
Getting back to the original question, in what ways were the 13th Amendment and emancipation enforced? I think it likely that many, many slave owners resisted the sudden freedom of their slaves–their economic backbone–and perhaps blocked word of said freedom from reaching them.
Your OP would require you to read a very long book on the Reconstruction.
There were thousands of issues that popped up after the Civil War.
One such example were “Black Codes” which were laws passed by Southern governments that pretty much made it impossible for a freed slave to live in a certain area.
Then there were problems on what was the legitimate government in each state. President Andrew Johnson was more amenable to allowing the Southern states back in if they ratified the 13th Amendment and promised to behave. When Representative and Senators from the former Confederate states came back to Congress to be sworn in, they were told to take a hike, as it were.
Needless to say, the dominant wing of the Republican Party, the Radicals, wanted a pound of flesh (and a bit more) and finally military troops came in to install Republican governments and make sure that slavey was abolished both de facto and de jure.
The Radical Republicans and Johnson never got along and eventually there were impeachment proceedings and it pretty much went all downhill from there.
After the disputed election of 1876, the Democrats were able to extract a promise from the Republicans to remove all Federal troops from the South. Thus endeth the Reconstruction and beginneth a long period of civil rights abuses in the South.
Remember, though, that the process wasn’t quite as sudden as the OP makes it out to be.
The Emancipation Proclamation affected only slaves in the states that had seceded, true. But the Union armies were busily marching through those areas from 1863 on. Many thousands of slaves found themselves effectively freed in the wake of the armies’ advances. Of course, “freedom” in the midst of devastated land surrounded by bitter southerners was not as joyous as it might be, but many ex-slaves joined or tagged along with the Union army or moved north.
By the end of the war, the South held only a comparatively tiny swath of territory. It was only in these areas that the slaves were “suddenly” freed by the war’s end. The 13th Amendment wasn’t ratified until December 1865, so by that time it just codified what was already reality for many months.
Reconstruction and its aftermath was a immensely complicated time, as you would have to expect when millions of people in half a country are affected. There is no one story on it. That’s why the advice to read a long book is good advice.