Who Owns This Land

Baley Wyat, Freedman

Wyat and a group of freedmen had been assigned to land near Yorktown, Virginia during the war. In this speech he protested President Andrew Johnson's insistance that confiscated lands should be returned to their former owners.

Source: Who Built America? v. I, 2nd ed. chapter 12.

Our wives, our children, our husbands, have been sold over and over again to purchase the lands we now locates upon; for that reason we have a divine right to the land...And then didn't we clear the land, and raise the crops of corn, of cotton, of tobacco, of rice, of sugar, of everything? And then didn't them large cities in the North grow up on the cotton and the sugar and the rice that we made? ... I say they has grown rich, and my people is poor.