Condition of African Americans Before and After The Civil War

Condition of African Americans Before and After the Civil War

Throughout much of the history of the United States, African Americans faced much hardship and unfair treatment. To escape these hardships, many slaves often ran away to the North or even to Canada using various methods, one of them being the Underground Railroad.  Some of the hardships include being enslaved, harassed, and abused. The nation was divided over many issues, one of them being slavery. The American Civil War was started for various reasons, and one of them included righting the wrongs done to the African American society. After the Union won the Civil War and slavery was abolished, African Americans enjoyed more liberties. However, the price of their new freedom came at the cost of new problems, which might make them worse off than before.

Before observing the conditions of African Americans after the Civil war, one should identify the causes of the war and the conditions of the African Americans before the Civil War. According to Adams,  “Past generations have cited the incompatibility of the southern and northern economic worldviews, incompetent and blundering policy makers, the breakdown of the Democratic-Whig party system, and the moral debate over slavery as the critical variable to explain secession and, perhaps more important, the long bloody war that followed.” The war resulted in the freeing of the enslaved in the South, causing the numbers of unemployment to increase greatly, and also destroying the South’s pre-modern agrarian mentality (Egnal). As a result, the North’s style of economy, American Capitalism, settled into the South. However, the South’s economy was still recovering from the war, and large numbers of African Americans moved out to search for work.

One of the most common ways of escaping from the hardships of slavery for African Americans was through the Underground Railroad. This rail consisted of “Conductors” and safe houses. The conductors would take in the runaway slaves and lead them on to the next safe house, where the runaways would continue their journey through the Underground Railroad to freedom. Many leaders, such as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman, who were all former slaves, led many across state lines to freedom (Vacca). Even though the slaves were escaped to the Free states, they were not always safe. If they were demanded to be returned to their master, the Northern state would be forced to return them. Because of this Fugitive Slave Act, the slaves would sometimes continue all the way into Canada, and there they would finally be safe.