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  1. May 2025
    1. Many southern governments enacted legislation that reestablished antebellum power relationships. South Carolina and Mississippi passed laws known as Black Codes to regulate Black behavior and impose social and economic control. Other states soon followed. These laws granted some rights to African Americans, like the right to own property, to marry, or to make contracts. But they also denied fundamental rights. White lawmakers forbade Black men from serving on juries or in state militias, refused to recognize Black testimony against white people, apprenticed orphaned children to their former enslaver, and established severe vagrancy laws. Mississippi’s vagrant law required all freedmen to carry papers proving they had means of employment.6 If they had no proof, they could be arrested and fined. If they could not pay the fine, the sheriff had the right to hire out his prisoner to anyone who was willing to pay the tax. Similar ambiguous vagrancy laws throughout the South reasserted control over Black labor in what one scholar has called “slavery by another name.”7 Black Codes effectively criminalized Black people’s leisure, limited their mobility, and locked many into exploitative farming contracts. Attempts to restore the antebellum economic order largely succeeded.

      The entirety of this text shows how America really operates, to this day. Its crazy to me how you so obviously enforce unfair and unequal laws against black people, which directly calling it "slavery". This was basically slavery with extra steps. Going back to my original sentence it shows how since the beginning of America we have found loop holes in the law and manipulate them to promote our own agendas.

    2. Initially proposed as a war aim, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation committed the United States to the abolition of slavery. However, the proclamation freed only enslaved people in areas of rebellion and left more than seven hundred thousand in bondage in Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri as well as in Union-occupied areas of Louisiana, Tennessee, and Virginia.

      Interesting, it mustve been tragic for those people to hear word of "free blacks", something that was unobtainable for them yet it must've brought them a glimpse of hope for them too.

    3. Reconstruction—the effort to restore southern states to the Union and to redefine African Americans’ place in American society

      This could be an identification term

    4. The answers to many of Reconstruction’s questions hinged on the concepts of citizenship and equality. The era witnessed perhaps the most open and widespread discussions of citizenship since the nation’s founding. It was a moment of revolutionary possibility and violent backlash. African Americans and Radical Republicans pushed the nation to finally realize the Declaration of Independence’s promises that “all men are created equal” and have “certain unalienable rights.” White Democrats granted African Americans legal freedom but little more. When Black Americans and their radical allies succeeded in securing citizenship for freedpeople, a new fight commenced to determine the legal, political, and social implications of American citizenship. Resistance continued, and Reconstruction eventually collapsed. In the South, limits on human freedom endured and would stand for nearly a century more.

      I find this text to be powerful, and it does feel relieving to know that even back then, people had the sense to question the hypocrisy of the Declaration of Independence when it come to the promise that "all men are created equal". It never made sense to me how America could state something so bold and powerful and yet throughout history reflect the opposite of that. Good for African American and the Radical Republicans to fight for that belief.

    5. The future of the South was uncertain. How would these states be brought back into the Union? Would they be conquered territories or equal states? How would they rebuild their governments, economies, and social systems? What rights did freedom confer on formerly enslaved people?

      This chapter may explore this topics of interest and could be questions on the quiz.