Essay: Reconstruction Era

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This is an essay on the freedom in reconstruction era. Confederate defeat and the end of slavery brought far-reaching changes in the lives of all Southerners. The destruction of slavery led certainly to conflict between blacks seeking to breathe substantive meaning into their freedom by asserting their independence from white control, and whites in quest of to retain as much as possible of the old order. The meaning of freedom itself became a point of conflict in the Reconstruction South.

Confederate defeat and the end of slavery brought far-reaching changes in the lives of all Southerners. The destruction of slavery led certainly to conflict between blacks seeking to breathe substantive meaning into their freedom by asserting their independence from white control, and whites in quest of to retain as much as possible of the old order. The meaning of freedom itself became a point of conflict in the Reconstruction South. Former slaves enjoyed the opportunity to exhibit their liberation from the countless regulations of slavery. Immediately after the Civil War, they sought to give meaning to freedom by reuniting families separated under slavery, found their own churches and schools, seeking economic autonomy, and demanding equal civil and political rights.  Most white Southerners reacted to defeat and emancipation with dismay. (Berlin 1982) Many families had experience the loss of loved ones and the destruction of property. Some thought of leaving the South altogether, or retreated into nostalgia for the Old South and the Lost Cause of the Confederacy.

Reconstruction-era drafters and ratifiers could not have planned it, but it is understandable that the grandest clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment would in time provide the vehicle for transforming the meaning of freedom under the Constitution – or, if you prefer, accommodating under the Constitution the transformation of freedom’s social and political meaning among the people. The due process clause offer that no state “shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

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