7. This Climate Enabled Plantation Owners To Recreate The System Of Slavery
With millions of African Americans now having to sign labor contracts with their former masters, the plantation owners were pretty much allowed to re-enslave them. To make matters worse, many Southern states passed “black codes” that imposed harsh penalties on former slaves.
For example, African American workers had to sign new labor contracts with plantation owners every year. Otherwise, they could be jailed for trespassing and vagrancy, seeing as they were “renting” land that was previously slave quarters. All this even though the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments granted African Americans citizenship and the right to vote.
