The
Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution was passed by both houses
on 8th June and the 13th June, 1866. The amendment was designed to
grant citizenship to and protect the civil liberties of recently freed
slaves. It did this by prohibiting states from denying or abridging
the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, depriving
any person of his life, liberty, or property without due process of
law, or denying to any person within their jurisdiction the equal
protection of the laws.
Most Southern states refused to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment and
therefore Radical Republicans such as
Thaddeus Stevens, Charles
Sumner, Benjamin Wade, Henry
Winter Davies and Benjamin Butler
urged the passing of further legislation to impose these measures
on the former Confederacy. The result was the 1867 Reconstruction
Acts that divided the South into five military districts controlled
by martial law, proclaimed universal manhood suffrage and required
the new state constitutions to be drawn up.
(1)
The mother of Annie
L. Burton, ran away during the Civil
War. She returned afterwards to claim her slave children. She
recorded the incident in her book, Memories of Childhood's Slavery
Days (1909)
My mother came for us at the end of the year 1865, and demanded that
her children be given up to her. This, mistress refused to do, and
threatened to set the dogs on my mother if she did not at once leave
the place. My mother went away, and remained with some of the neighbors
until supper time. Then she got a boy to tell Caroline to come down
to the fence. When she came, my mother told her to go back and get
Henry and myself and bring us down to the gap in the fence as quick
as she could. Then my mother took Henry in her arms, and my sister
carried me on her back. We climbed fences and crossed fields, and
after several hours came to a little hut which my mother had secured
on a plantation. We had no more than reached the place, and made a
little fire, when master's two sons rode up and demanded that the
children be returned. My mother refused to give us up. Upon her offering
to go with them to the Yankee headquarters to find out if it were
really true that all negroes had been made free, the young men left,
and troubled us no more.
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