The years immediately following the Civil War were extremely turbulent, full of conflicts and disagreements. It seems as though everyone had a differing opinion of the direction the United States of America should have gone in these difficult years. The dictionary defines the word "emancipation" as the "freeing someone from the control of another; especially a parent's relinquishing authority and control over a minor child. Unfortunately, the actual act of emancipating the slaves in America was not as simple as that. The time after the war and the way the slaves were treated then carried on and ultimately lead to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960's. Americans at the time, both black and white, disagreed on the issue of emancipation at the time.
             The emancipation of African Americans was an issue that effected all Americans: white, black, men, women, northerners, and southerners. And every group of Americans seemed to have a different take on it. In Lorence's book Enduring Voices, there are several examples to the feelings and reactions of Americans at this turbulent time. One example was an entry written by a Southern planter's wife about their former slave. It is apparent by the way she conveys the former slave in the entry that the Southerners at the time saw African Americans as "less than human." She belittles him by having him talk like a child, saying words wrong and in general just sounding uneducated and incapable. So, of course, if the Southerners at the time felt that the blacks were incapable of thinking in the same way that the whites were, of course emancipation was not the success the government had hoped for, which is why in the entry, the planter's former slave was forced to move back and do the same job he had always done.
             Lorence was actually able to get ahold of interviews of former slaves recollecting this point in time and how dif
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