Reconstruction and Daily Life 18.2

How did formerly enslaved people first respond to freedom? They wanted to leave the plantations- large farms that had raised cash crops using slave labor. Why??? Because they could Looking for economic opportunities for the first time they could Legally marry, raise families, strengthen family ties by looking for lost loved ones.

How did formerly enslaved people first respond to freedom? Freedman Schools- schools set up to educate newly freed African Americans. By 1869 twenty percent of the South’s adults could read. However, many whites found this threatening sometimes killing teachers and burning schools.

What prevented formerly enslaved people from making greater economic advances? Land meant economic independence. Forty acres and a mule Sherman set up a program to split up the Southern farmland into 40 acre parcels and give each family a mule. Farmers were pardoned by Johnson and their land was given back to them so freedmen were left with nothing. Can you have civil rights without economic independence???

Sharecropping- system under which landowners gave poor farmers seed, tools. And land to cultivate in exchange for part of their harvest.

What were the goals of the Ku Klux Klan? - secret group that used violence to try to restore Democratic control of the South and keep African Americans powerless. Beat and tortured people, burned schools, churches and homes. Kept Republicans away from the polls so the Democrats power increased. They lynched some victims- hung them by the neck without a trial