After the Civil War, many African Americans fought for the chance to be granted more freedom. Doc.C, Americans of African descent hold a petition in the capitol for voting rights.During this petition, the citizens wanted their basic freedoms clearly defined. There were several black soldiers in war against “rebel forces”. They were upset that though they fought against the Union they were not allowed the simple liberty of voting. Blacks were also denied the right to own land (Doc. E). The Freedmen’s Bureau’s intent was to give free slaves homesteads, …show more content…
The petition asserted black’s rights to own land. This paralleled with the “40 acres and a mule” slogan, in which the federal government gave nearly 1000 black families a mule and a patch of land. This was to give families a chance to start a new life being free. The Bureau suffered after the southern plantation owners returned and demanded their land. The government eventually returned the land they had taken. Most blacks and a minority of whites were left with no land they could call their own by the end of the 1890s. As a result, most black agricultural laborers became tenants of wealthy white landowners paying them rent or a share of their crop. This became known as sharecropping. This system showed similarity to the antebellum plantation, in which slaves lied and worked under a master. However, the worst came for freedmen with the rise of the White League and the Ku Klux Klan (Doc. I) The purpose was to show that even though blacks were free, terrorists-like activities against blacks such as lynchings and burnings were much worse than slavery. With these