Life After Slavery

Imagine that…

Imagine that when night falls, you have to make the risky decision to escape a plantation to have a better life. You would have to leave everything you have ever known and it was unclear if you were going to see it again. Your mother and father who gave everything they could to protect you, and raise you, you would not be able to talk to them for a long time, or maybe never again. Your siblings who you would have made fun memories with and were always laughing. Your aunts and uncles whom you would have seen on a daily basis. The friends and neighbors you could vent to about the harsh punishment you had endured earlier for not washing a plate correctly or slacking off on your work because you were exhausted. Imagine that if you were caught trying to escape you would be imprisoned and not given food or you could even be killed. If you managed to escape successfully, where were you going to go? What were you going to do for work? You would not have known people in the North and they might not have known what you suffered through. But what if you did not have to escape? What if you could have walked away free without being stripped of everything you had? Before this I-Search Paper, I knew that Abraham Lincoln liberated slaves, but I did not know that he only released slaves in states where there was rebellion. I generally had knowledge that they were treated in an inhumane order. I did not know that Abraham Lincoln had been neutral on the topic of slavery, and had changed his opinion during his presidency.  The question that I ended up creating was: How did slaves transition into becoming American citizens? My topic relates to class because the debate over slavery was one of the main causes as to why the country had gone to war with itself. Also, Abraham Lincoln was the first person to make a change in how African Americans in the United States were treated. The topic of slavery is interesting to me because for years I have wondered what purpose was there for the southerners to treat people the way they did, and how they could deal with themselves knowing that they had inflicted emotional and physical pain into the lives of so many human beings who did not deserve it.

Abraham Lincoln (pictured above) was the President of the United States during the Civil War.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UtmGASVozN5_028zJd5bQt8Ix6B99Mj_pXnSIBJw2Vg/edit?usp=sharing