Social, Economic, and Political Changes

Social Changes

• African American leaders led efforts to help formerly enslaved people transition into their lives as free citizens
• Churches were the most important community institution, aside from family
• Black churches in the North sent money to help local communities set up churches after the war, and reconnect with families separated from slavery

Economic Changes

• Near the end of the war, the Union army issued Special Field Orders No. 15, which directed that the plantation land seized by the army in South Carolina and Georgia should be distributed to the newly freed people.
• Required that the land should be divided into 40-acre plots and should be given to the formerly enslaved people.

Political Changes

• Reconstruction brought the first moment of mass democratic participation for African Americans. After the Reconstruction Act of 1867 forced southern white Democrats to allow African Americans to vote, more than 600 formerly enslaved men were elected to state and local offices.

The African Americans served at every level of government during Reconstruction.

• At the federal level, Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce served as the U.S. senators from Mississippi.
• At the state level, more than 1,000 African American men held offices in the South.
• Almost 800 African American men served as state legislators around the South, with the African Americans at one time making up a majority in the South Carolina House of Representatives.

Sharecropping

Many white landowners refused to surrender their land, and this government's promise of 40 acres was later reversed and unfulfilled by President Andrew Johnson. This action dashed the hopes of land ownership for many former enslaved people. Without ready cash, there was no chance to buy land. As a result, the Black farmers often turned to sharecropping, a system in which the farmer promises to work on the landowner's field using their resources and equipment. In return, the sharecropper received a place to live and the promise of a small part of the harvest, usually about one-half or one-third.

• Sharecropping often led to cycles of debt
• The system kept families bound to the land
• Many poor white farmers in the South also became sharecroppers
• Sharecropping rarely maintained the same low economic status of formerly enslaved people

"Forty Aces and a Mule"

The Union army also gave some mules to these new landowners, and the policy became known as "forty acres and a mule." The ability to own their own plots of land to work and sustain a family was viewed by many African Americans as the key to a successful life, especially in the predominately agricultural South. Thousands of freed people applied for land grants and established self-governed towns.

The African American officeholders came from diverse backgrounds. Some had freed themselves from slavery by going to the North. They later returned to the South after the war, to progress the rights of the African Americans. Many were born free African Americans. They were wealthy and well-educated. In a short time, the South was transformed from an all-white, pro-slavery, Democratic stronghold to a collection of Republican-led states with African Americans in positions of power for the first time in American history.

The Freedmen's Bureau

Other organizations, like the Freedmen's Bureau, helped southern Black Americans by creating hospitals, orphanages, and other institutions to serve the Black community. The Bureau's goals were to:

• support poor white people and free people's immediate needs, like food, clothing, and shelter
• aid African Americans in legal contracts, work training, literacy, education, access to medical care, finding family members separated during enslavement, obtaining birth and marriage certificates, and more