America before 1865 was not the land of the free at all. Slavery was in full effect, slaves were around every corner on every farm and in every white mans house. Until 1865 where the land of the free actually became the land of the free. “In 1865 an Illinois congressman declared that was the end of the Civil War, and the United States was a “new nation,” for the first time “wholly free” (Forner 548). the term freedom meant something different to everyone and really didn’t have a concrete meaning. To the slaves it meant no more chains and whips and having to listen to the “master.'” For the master it meant losing their housekeeper, farm keeper, anything that they made the slaves do. Even though the African Americans were free from the chains and the whips they weren't treated with the same abilities that the white people were treated with.

“The African-American's understanding of freedom was shaped by their experiences as slaves and their observations of the free society around them”(Forner 548). The African-Americans wanted to do whatever they saw the free white men doing which was own land, raise families go to work while the wife stayed at home, vote, and have a say in what church they would attend. The former slaves did create their own churches and families, Forner says on page 549, “One northern reporter in 1865 encountered a freedman who had walked more than 600 miles from Georgia to North Carolina, searching for the wife and children whom he had been sold away before the war.” This shows that the slaves wanted to have the family so bad that they would walk all across America. As for the churches the African-Americans abandoned the white-controlled religious institutions and made their own