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What Is Lincoln's Hardships For African Americans

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President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, which abolished the chattel enslavement of African Americans. This was an important phenomenon for all slaves, abolitionists, and opposers of the brutal American slave system. The process of attaining a life free of bondage was extremely difficult and dangerous for slaves and anyone who assisted. Therefore, victims of slavery longed for the day to be legally free. Being unrestricted seemed better, and of course it was, but it also introduced a new breed of hardships for African Americans. In some slave narratives, former slaves actually confessed that life as a slave was in many ways better than the free life they have now. Financing a new lifestyle, facing a …show more content…

Instead, slave masters “took care of their property” to ensure they were suitable for brutal toil and breeding. The master clothed, fed and provided shelter for the servants. Once slaves were free from subjugation, their master no longer provided those necessities. In contrast to the enslavement lifestyle, slaves had to cope with providing for themselves with very little or no money being a free person. As a result of slavery and oppression, African Americans severely lacked literacy; so the only the occupations they were capable of executing was field work and similar manual labor. Majority of blacks turned to sharecropping because they had no money nor owned any land. Sharecropping resulted in little progression within the African American family, since they were unable to wholly reap the benefits of their hard labor, similar to the enslavement …show more content…

Master brutally beat their slaves daily to ensure the slaves’ powerlessness. Female slaves were raped by their owners and families were continually divided by the auction block. The abolishing did not eliminate the mistreatment slaves endured from whites. During the Reconstruction era, supremacist groups began to gain popularity, the Klu Klux Klan being the most popular. Similar to the violent behavior enforced upon slaves by their masters, supremacist groups imposed the utmost fear in the black community by lynching and beating African Americans. Blacks tried their best to avoid trouble from “the white man”, so they live their life with much caution. African - Americans did not receive mistreatment just from whites; they received mistreatment from each other. Slavery initiated a tension between the house slave and field slave. The house slave was someone of a lighter skin tone (mostly they were mulatto since they were descendants of the slave owner) while the field slave was the darkest tone of slaves. The house slave considered theirselves better since they were not outside, subjected to the harsh sun. Former slaves who were lighter got jobs easier and were occasionally not as cruelly treated as darker African Americans. This colorism mentality continued to spread far beyond the time slavery, it is occasionally evident in today’s

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