In the mid-19th century, the United States was split into two, forced to fight against each other in the Civil War. The Civil War started because the South was feeling neglected by the Government. They felt as if all of the decisions that the Government had made, were done so to cater to the North, hence the start of the Civil War. After the Civil War, a War they lost, was in shambles. Their economy and society had been ruined from the loss of slavery and from the money that they owed for the damages they caused. The South were forced to quickly rebuild themselves, before getting caught too far behind the rest of the country. Before the Civil War, the South relied heavily on slave labor to keep their plantations running. After the Civil War, however, the 13th amendment outlawed slavery, and they were no longer allowed to force people to work without pay. The farmers, scrambling to replace the lost laborers, came up with two solutions. The first solution was sharecropping and tenant farming, where plantation owners leased out their land, allowing people to pay a recurring fee, to live on the land and grow their own crops. This meant that the land owners were making money by doing nothing, and that the poorer farmers that could not afford their own land, could grow and sell their crops for cheaper. Sometimes the land …show more content…
The solution to this was the Jim Crow laws, which were meant to oppress the newly freed black people by making minor everyday occurrences for them illegal. The other reason these laws were made was because though the 13th amendment had outlawed nearly all kinds of slavery, it was still legal to enslave prisoners. Examples of the laws include Jaywalking, which many poor people who couldn’t afford cars were forced to do, and separate but equal laws, which forbid black people from being in the same places as white