What Was The Significance Of The 13th Amendment By Joseph Farley

The thirteenth amendment was passed in 1865, in the aftermath of the Civil War, and is considered the beginning of reconstruction. This amendment allowed for doors to open for American citizens and former slaves. An example of one of these former slaves is Joseph Farley, who was born in 1843 in Virginia. He later ran away to join the Union Army. Farley, like other former African-American slaves, felt the wrath of angry ex-Confederate citizens in many ways than one. Despite all this, Farley never gave up and exercised his rights as a free man and never thought of himself as anything less than a proud solider. After the Civil War, ex-Confederate citizens were angry that their former slaves were given freedom, resulting in the creation of racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), which is still around to this day. Farley told us a story of how he and 600 other soldiers saw about 100 KKK members walking down the street to hang a man, but once they saw them, they “passed on by the house and went on back to town and never did bother the man.” He also tells a story about an African-American marrying a white woman, which was frowned upon at the time, Farley was at the wedding defending their right to get married. When the fifteenth amendment passed, many African-American men took

Some former slaves worked for pay, of course their bosses were white, but Farley even stood up to his white boss on voting day when he tried telling Farley what he should vote for, “A white man told me that if I voted Republican he would fire me, so I told him to fire me then…they told me they liked my principle and I could go on and go to work.” This says a lot about Farley’s character, he doesn’t let anyone talk down on him since the day he ran away. Farley now saw himself to hold equal value as that of a white