"We Simply Ask": Sourcing a Freedpeople's Address, 1865

Reconstruction in South Carolina

1When the Civil War ended in the spring of 1865, about 400,000 people who had been enslaved in South Carolina were free. The 13th Amendment, ratified in December 1865, ended slavery everywhere in the United States. But freedom left many questions open. Would freedpeople be citizens? Could they vote, own land, go to school and be treated equally in court?

2President Andrew Johnson let Southern states form new governments quickly, as long as they accepted the end of slavery. South Carolina's new legislature, elected only by white men, passed Black Codes in late 1865. These laws applied only to Black South Carolinians. They required a special paid license for most jobs other than farming or household work, and they set strict rules for Black workers who signed labor contracts with employers.

3Freedpeople organized to answer. In November 1865, delegates met for a Colored People's Convention at Zion Church in Charleston. Some delegates had been free before the war; others had been enslaved. They sent a petition to Congress and wrote an address to the white people of South Carolina.

4Congress soon took a different path from Johnson. It passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 over his veto, and the 14th Amendment (1868) made everyone born in the United States a citizen and promised all persons the equal protection of the laws. Under the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, Black men in the South voted. A new South Carolina constitution in 1868 created the state's first system of free public schools for all children. Black South Carolinians won a majority of seats in the state's House of Representatives, and Robert Smalls, who had escaped slavery in 1862 by steering a Confederate ship out of Charleston harbor, later served in Congress. The 15th Amendment (1870) said the right to vote could not be denied because of race.

5These gains did not last. Groups such as the Ku Klux Klan used threats and violence to keep Black voters from the polls. Many Northern voters lost interest in the South, especially after hard economic times began in 1873. In 1877 federal troops were withdrawn from South Carolina's statehouse, and white Democrats took full control of the state government. Over the next decades, new laws and threats took the vote from most Black South Carolinians, although the 14th and 15th Amendments stayed in the Constitution, where later generations would use them.