Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [300]
As if to confirm black land aspirations, the Federal government adopted an ambitious settlement program in direct response to the thousands of unwanted and burdensome freed slaves who had attached themselves to the Union Army in the wake of General Sherman’s march to the sea. On January 12, 1865, Sherman and Secretary of War Stanton conferred with twenty black ministers and church officers in Savannah to ascertain what could be done about these people. The delegation suggested that land was the key to black freedom. “We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it, and make it our own,” the spokesmen for the group declared. Several days later, Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, a far-reaching document that set aside for the exclusive use of the freedmen a strip of coastal land abandoned by Confederate owners between Charleston, South Carolina, and Jacksonville, Florida, granting black settlers “possessory titles” to forty-acre lots. Although intended only to deal with a specific military and refugee problem, the order encouraged the growing impression among the freedmen that their Yankee liberators intended to provide them with an essential undergirding for their emancipation. That impression gained still further credence when Congress made the newly established Freedmen’s Bureau the custodian of all abandoned and confiscated land (largely the lands seized for nonpayment of the direct Federal tax or belonging to disloyal planters who had fled); ex-slaves and loyal Unionists could pre-empt forty-acre lots, rent them at nominal rates for three years, and purchase them within that period at a fair price (about sixteen times the annual rent). If the Bureau had implemented this provision, and if blacks had been able to accumulate the necessary funds, some 20,000 black families would have been provided with the means for becoming self-sustaining farmers.29
To apportion the large landed estates among those who worked them and who had already expended years of uncompensated toil made such eminent sense to the ex-slave that he could not easily dismiss this aspiration as but another “exaggerated” or “absurd” view of freedom. “My master has had me ever since I was seven years old, and never give me nothing,” observed a twenty-one-year-old laborer in Richmond. “I worked for him twelve years, and I think something is due me.” Expecting nothing from his old master, he now trusted the government to do “something for us.” The day a South Carolina rice planter anticipated trouble was when one of his field hands told him that “the land ought to belong to the man who (alone) could work it,” not to those who “sit in the house” and profit by the labor of others. Such sentiments easily translated into the most American of aspirations. “All I wants is to git to own fo’ or five acres ob land, dat I can build me a little house on and call my home,” a Mississippi black explained. With the acquisition of land, the ex-slave viewed himself entering the mainstream of American life, cultivating his own farm and raising the crops with which to sustain himself and his family. That was the way to respectability in an agricultural society, and the freedman insisted that a plot of land was all he required to lift himself up: “Gib us our own land and we take care ourselves; but widout land, de ole massas can hire us or starve us, as dey please.” And what better way to confirm their emancipation than to own the very land on which