14th added anyone born in the US is a citizen.
15th Guaranteed voting rights for African Americans
Their offices were protected by republican politicians.
The policies of the Black Codes limited the rights of the southern black freemen
It was often it was often made up of important men in southern society.
Being a sharecropper or raising cotton in 1875 in Mississippi is exhausting, demeaning and destroys personal initiative. Being a share cropper might mean that you will have a little something left over for yourself if you have a very good crop. But without good crops, you will have nothing. My family and I work in the fields from sun up to sundown. We don’t own the land we work on. Our owner lets us grow crops on his land and takes a percentage of any profit. Sometimes we make enough money to have enough to eat and clothe ourselves. But it is more often that we just barely scrimp by. We eat what we can grow and on occasion, we can kill a chicken that we have raised. It is not a life you would wish on anyone.
<span>The answer is that the Congress could not levy taxes.</span>
By 1774, the year leading up to the Revolutionary War, trouble was brewing in America. Parliament (England's Congress) had been passing laws placing taxes on the colonists in America. There had been the Sugar Act in 1764, the Stamp Act the following year, and a variety of other laws that were meant to get money from the colonists for Great Britain. The colonists did not like these laws.
Great Britain was passing these laws because of the French and Indian War, which had ended in 1763. That war, which had been fought in North America, left Great Britain with a huge debt that had to be paid. Parliament said it had fought the long and costly war to protect its American subjects from the powerful French in Canada. Parliament said it was right to tax the American colonists to help pay the bills for the war
Most Americans disagreed. They believed that England had fought the expensive war mostly to strengthen its empire and increase its wealth, not to benefit its American subjects. Also, Parliament was elected by people living in England, and the colonists felt that lawmakers living in England could not understand the colonists' needs. The colonists felt that since they did not take part in voting for members of Parliament in England they were not represented in Parliament. So Parliament did not have the right to take their money by imposing taxes. "No taxation without representation" became the American rallying cry.
The Barbary pirates were seizing US ships for ransom. One time with two British frigates near bye. That forced a change in Jefferson and he realized he had to have a Navy. He order the Constitution class frigates and some smaller vessels. The start of the blue-water Navy.
