Tuesday, December 8, 2009

The end of the civil war

The civil war finally ends. The South is in fury. The North celebrates as expected. In the South, all the lands are devastated and the people don’t know what to do. Houses are burned, many dead bodies are left behind, and people are starting to get hungry. During this war, many farmlands were destroyed leaving the people behind with nowhere else to plant their crops. Also, two thirds of the shipping industries were damaged. As for the soldiers, many of them are suffering from injuries and the rest are dead in the war. Their only hopes know is to flee for their lives.

Almost 38,000 African Americans were killed in this war. The rest that stayed alive are now located in a poor region in which the economic activity is slow. With this support we can say that they earned their freedom but not in a good way. Some of these people decided to continue working in the plantation of their master. Others thought in moving to cities and try to find jobs. In this war, these African American people were paid 7 dollars each month which was half the salary of a white soldier. What they cared the most about is fighting in order to earn their freedom. Some questions started to be stated about African Americans. One of them is “Now that the black southerners were free, would the races have equal rights? If so, how might those rights might be protected. If they earlier said that these people were free men, why do they need to ask themselves this question?

As for President Lincoln, he passed out his reconstruction plan in which many people were not pleased with. Right after, he got assassinated by John Wilkes. This gave the chance for the vice president Andrew Johnson to take over as President. He wrote his reconstruction plan in which he accorded many favors to the South. This was partially because he came from North Carolina which was a South state. Some of his ideas were that he “pardoned the southerners who swore allegiance to the Union. He permitted each state to hold a constitutional convention. He also stated that states were required to void secession, abolish slavery, and repudiate the confederate debt, and finally, states could then hold elections and rejoin the Union. These new ideas were not exactly the same as Lincoln’s ideas. Lincoln helped the South in some ways while Johnson helped the south in all the ways. Lincoln also mentioned a harsh law that stated that it denied pardons for any Southern person that killed an African American war prisoner.

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