The Sea Islands: An Experiment in Land
Redistribution
Prior to any formal, governmental policy on
reconstruction, General William T. Sherman created his own
land redistribution policy. Sherman meet with Edwin Stanton,
Lincoln's Secretary of War, and a delegation of twenty black
leaders on January 12, 1865 to address the problems of the
Freedmen. After hearing that what the Freedmen desired most
was their own land, he issued Special
Field Order #15.
This order declared that the Sea Islands on the coast of
South Carolina and Georgia would be reserved for Freedman.
Under this order each family would be eligible for 40 acres
of land for their own cultivation. The area included the
islands of Hilton Head, Port Royal, St. Helena and many
other smaller islands that had been under Union
control since 1861. Sherman would go on to allow
Freedmen use of army mules that were were no longer fit for
army service. These acts would serve as the basis for the
cry of "forty acres and a mule," the basis for many
Freedmen's hopes and demands later in reconstruction.
What prompted Sherman's order? Was he a humanitarian? Or
a staunch supporter of the Freedmen? It seems likely that
Sherman's intention was simply to relieve his army of the
thousands of Freedmen and women who had been following it
since Sherman's invasion of Georgia. As Sherman's army
marched by, freedman had abandoned the plantations and begun
to follow the army. Feeding and clothing thousands of people
became a strain. Sherman would later claim that his order
was a temporary measure and was not meant to give the
Freedmen permanent possession of the land.
Whatever his intentions, by June of 1865 over 40,000
Freedmen had settled in the Sea Islands area, working over
400,000 acres of land. The former slaves believed that this
was their land now, theirs to keep. Congress had also
established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedman and Abandoned
Lands (the Freedmen's Bureau) shortly after Sherman's order
was issued. The bureau had the authority to give forty acres
plots of abandoned and confiscated land to to Freedman and
Southern white refugees who had been loyal to the Union. In
addition, the man in charge of the Sea Islands as inspector
of Settlements and Plantations, General Rufus Saxton, was a
supporter of the Freedmen and he worked to make the program
successful.
In addition to providing land for agriculture, community
leaders worked to provide other resources. Under slavery it
had been illegal to teach a slave to read. The freedman
demanded education and schools were established throughout
the islands. Black and white educators came from all over
the nation to provide assistance.
But the policy of land redistribution never met with
full support in Congress. Some argued for a "hands off"
approach to the Freedmen, which which they claimed would
foster independence, while others insisted that it would be
unfair to abandon the Freedmen to their former masters
without the economic base they would need to become
independent citizens. The freedmen and women, on the other
hand, came to the table with a clear sense that they had
already earned the land with their labors as slaves--the
profit they produced had been stolen from them, and so they
had already paid for the land many times over. Congress
created the Freedmen's bureau as a temporary compromise
measure which would aid Freedmen and women in the immediate
transition to freedom but prevent any long-term dependency.
Even so, between Sherman's Special Field Order and the
creation of the Freedmen's Bureau, the former slaves on the
Sea Islands believed that they had secured the land they
needed.
Their security would turn out to be short-lived.
President Andrew Johnson began the assault on the Sea
Islands experiment in January 1866, when he removed General
Saxton from office, pardoned many former rebels, and gave
the order that confiscated land be returned to its former
owners. The freed men and women were urged to go to work as
paid laborers for their former masters.
The Sea Islands came to serve as a test for the policy
of land confiscation advocated by the Radical Republicans in
Congress. Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner had argued
that the plantations must be divided in order to break the
power of the slave holding class who had fostered the
rebellion. Pennsylvania Congressman Thaddeus Stevens argued
that the South could never be truly free until its land was
worked by independent owners instead of a ruling class.
Looking positively on the Sea Island experiment, Stevens
proposed redistributing 394,000,000 acres owned by about
70,000 rebels. The land would be given to Freedmen and the
remainder sold to aid the government in reducing the public
debt and providing pensions.
The omission of land confiscation from the
Reconstruction Acts of 1867 was a severe blow to the Radical
Republicans, and to their plans to aid the Freedmen and
break the Southern ruling class. Without a strong economic
base the Freedmen were again at the mercy of the white men.
It allowed white slaveholders to regain power over the
Freedmen and would eventually lead to the system of contract
labor and sharecropping. Some Freedmen would retain control
of their land in the Sea Islands, but by the 1920s these
holdings were on average only two to four acres. The Sea
Islands changed but not in the way Radical Republicans and
Freedmen had hoped. They went from one of the richest
districts in the South for the white slaveholders to a beach
resort for the well-to-do. The dream of a independent yeomen
class of African American farmers faded, and life for
African Americans in the area came to be characterized by
poverty and limited opportunity.
Written by M. O'Malley & F. L. Carr for GMU's History 122 (Spring 1999).
Sources: Sterling, Dorothy. The Trouble They Seen: Black People Tell the Story of Reconstruction. Garden City New York: Doubleday, 1976; Foner, Eric, Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and its Legacy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1983; Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution: 1863-1877; Stampp, Kenneth. The Era of Reconstruction: 1865-1877. New York: Knopf, 1965.
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