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Emancipation Proclamation Dbq

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“That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free...”() was the first lines of the Emancipation Proclamation. The Emancipation Proclamation was issued in 1863 during the height of the Civil War. So, what now? All the slaves in America are free, right? Well, kinda of. It is more complicated than that, the slaves in the Confederacy are free but only in time of war. The President at the time, Abraham Lincoln did not free the slaves in the Union and the Border states because he did not want them to …show more content…

Lincoln was working to get the Thirteenth Amendment passed after the Civil War. Thirteenth Amendment was passed in 1865. The Thirteenth Amendment read, "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction"”(“Primary Documents in American History”). The Thirteenth Amendment legally freed the slaves. They were freed legally in the constitution but socially and economically they were not free. They were held in labor contracts by former slave owners. Freed slaves could not read or write, so they ended up in a contract that was slavery in a different form. The labor contracts, or sharecropping left the freed slaves economically depend on their former slave …show more content…

The United States is now still seeing reconstruction. In Charlottesville there is a statute of Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall”, they have both been there for about 93 years and there were KKK demonstrations as well as counter protests. Recently, there was a lawsuit against the statues and one of the plaintiffs said”this is all about family”(Duggan). In relation to his ancestry to confederate soldiers. There are many who agree with the statues, only because they do not have historical knowledge of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Many people believe the Civil War was primarily about state rights which it is about slavery, There are still many arguments over the topic, those who oppose the statues say,” the monuments amounted to revisionist history, an effort to reassert white supremacy and give an aura of nobility and heroism to the long-lost secessionist cause”(Duggan). Many believe that the monuments are determital because they honor leaders of the confederacy, those who fought for slavery in the South. The monuments honor historical figures, who believed they were superior because their race. The statues are constantly being debated over, which explain why recounstion never really ended. At a protest, ”The statues of Robert E. Lee and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson — both military heroes of the Confederacy —

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