Emancipation Proclamation In 1865

In 1865 there were many rumors that had spread among the slaves about the Emancipation Proclamation.(which had been signed two years before)

The Emancipation Proclamation declared that all slaves in the 11 Rebel states were free. In 1865 the Thirteenth amendment was passed which freed all slaves in the US. The Thirteenth amendment took about a year to be ratified and fully enforced.

During this time Mittie (14 year old slave) heard about the Yankees going through the South and telling all the slaves that they were free like white people.

Many white northerners didn’t approve of racial equality, but they were still for the emancipation because it would destroy the South’s economy and wage war and “bring the Rebels to their knees.”

Southerners

The cost of the war was nearly $6.6 billion or $22 trillion today.

The Klan began to meet at an abandoned house they found after their first gallop. They dressed in robes and pointy hats.

They tore up parties and barbecues

They Klan would put letters in the newspaper inviting people to come to the meetings and join the Klan.

The KKK is ran by the ‘Grand Cyclops’

The people became scared of the ‘hooded Lictors’ standing outside, because when they were asked who they were they would respond with “A spirit from the other world. I was killed at Chickamauga.”

The Klan was glad that they were scaring the people, no one went near the Klan’s den.

The men in the Klan would patrol the streets and whip black people of they saw them and sometimes shoot them at random.

“Words would have been eating me now” in April 1867, klan leaders from all over Tennessee checked into the maxwell house, a fancy hotel in Nashville. Within a few days, nearly every important Tennessee democrat also arrived in town for the state convention to nominate candidates for the coming fall local and state elections.

By 1868 the Ku Klux Klan had spread into every former confederate state and even kentucky, a state that had sided with the union during the

A year later, he voted the reconstruction act, laws that allowed freedmen to vote in southern elections and forced the former southern states to ratify the fourteenth amendment, which granted citizenship and equal protection of the law to freed people.

During the Reconstruction Era, around four thousand Northern men and women travelled to the South to create schools to educate African-Americans with the help of the Freedman’s Bureau and philanthropic societies.

It was a very challenging task. Most slaves were illiterate their entire lives and educating African-Americans was challenged by many Southern white people.

A teacher from Canada named William Luke was hired to teach black workers and their families. After being arrested under the allegation of planning on burning the town down. The Klansmen broke into the prison and with four other prisoners took Luke. They lynched the four black men and before they lynched Luke, they allowed him to write a letter to his