6. The President Reneged On Promises To Freed Slaves
In the summer of 1865, President Andrew Johnson, in beginning the process of Reconstruction that would repatriate the defeated South, declared that all former Confederate lands would be given back to the people who owned it before the war. In other words, if freed slaves had been given land on what was once a plantation, that land went back to the plantation owner.
The Freedmen’s Bureau had been created to help the millions of freed slaves integrate into society. And now, it had to inform all of the freed slaves that their options were now severely limited: they had to sign labor contracts with the plantation owners because they would not have any land of their own.
