"Former Slave"

During Reconstruction, Ammendments 13, 14, and 15 were established. Ammendment 13 abolished slavery, Ammendment 14 provided constituional guarentee of the right and security of freed people, and Ammendment 15 gave the right to vote based on race, color, or previous conditions of servitude. All of this sounds beautiful, correct? One would think that the arrival of the Reconstruction period would mean a whole new life for previous slaves, filled with rights and oppurtunity. However, things were definitely not as they seemed. Once freed, former slaves didn't have anywhere to go. The only life they ever knew was servitude, and when they all of a sudden need to find something other than that, there weren't many options for them. So then came sharecropping, which inadvertantly became a system of survival for them. In sharecropping, a landowner would own a piece of property, and rent out bits of the land to the former slaves and their family. They would pay interest to the land owner, and attend to all the tasks assigned to them, then in turn would be compensated with a salary based on the quality of their work. However, sharecropping entailed so much labor for so little pay, that it became extremely close to a legal form of slavery. The main difference between sharecropping and slavery was the worker now had the right to leave whenever they wanted to. However, this "option" of freedom was a faint and distant one, as the country offered very few alternatives of survival for former slaves. So, altogether, the Reconstruction era, in the end, provided a false sense of freedom for former slaves, and didn't actually change their conditions by much.