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Reconstruction needed to be bungled to ensure that the emancipated slaves did not become part of the landed class within the American population. With the abolition of slavery after the Civil War, it also was the abolition of the “southern economic system” the south was seeking to maintain. The south, having lost the war, would have to rapidly adapt to a wage labor system, and much of the emancipated population drew up contracts with their former owners and returned to their plantations as wageworkers. Slavery, as an economic system, was unable to compete with the emerging industrialization of the agribusiness in the north. Much of the southern “wealth” was tied up in their property (which included people), this property was leveraged as collateral on loans which funded much of the southern plantation owners’ extravagant lifestyles, as they had no real liquid assets to spend.
If the freed people of the south were given 40 acres and a mule as they were promised by William T. Sherman, you would have seen a rise of a new landed class, and potentially the formation of a new Black lead state. Unlike in the District of Columbia, where northern slavers were given compensation for their loss of “property” after the DC slaves were emancipated, the southern states were given no such compensation. Post-war, the former Confederate States were strapped with war debt that deeply impoverished the former wealthy classes. As the states were reintegrated back into the Union, they also participated in paying for the Union’s efforts in the war. While the latter half of this debt would have been shared by the Black landed class, it wouldn’t have had the same connections to the confederate war debt, much of which was held by individuals and not the state(s). The former Confederate states were effectively bankrupt post-war, and this is what drove the practice of Peonage or “Debt Slavery”, as well as sharecropping, that haunted the freed people in the post-war era. This would have left the new landed class in an advantageous position, free of most of the war debt, suddenly in possession of effectively a turn-key agroindustry.
A detail of this land reform policy that is often omitted from its retelling, is that the land also came with military protection; “until such time as they can protect themselves, or until Congress shall regulate their title”. This land constituted a contiguous 30-mile-long strip of abandoned or confiscated Confederate plantations from Charleston, South Carolina to Jacksonville, Florida. It also included an exclusive right to the freed population to settle the region; “in the settlements hereafter to be established, no white person whatever, unless military officers and soldiers detailed for duty, shall be permitted to reside; and the sole and exclusive management of affairs will be left to the freed people themselves.”
Could this have really been the foundation of a new Black state within the borders of the greater United States? Very likely, based on the actions and developments as a result of this redistribution of land. Skidway Island, representing almost 11,430 acres, was home to dozens of former plantations. With assistance from Ulysses L. Huston (future representative of Georgia, and instrumental in the writing of this land reform), over 1000 freed people had been resettled to Skidway in an attempt to build a self-sufficient Black colony. Fifty freed men and women were issued land titles at Grove Hill on the mainland, south of Savannah. They held elections that formed a board of representatives who advised the Freedmen’s Bureau* agent in their district, formed their own militia, and continued producing rice to sell in Savannah. Not long after this reform was announced, Rufus Saxton, charged with implementing and overseeing the order, reported some 40,000 Black citizens had settled on the land. The political and economic activity within the area show a clear intention of building Black lead communities and organizations independent of white influence.
If this land ownership were to endure, it would have an estimated value of $640 billion, according to 2020 estimates. The implications of this land redistribution posed a serious and imitate threat to white dominance in the south. If this state had been allowed to flourish, one could imagine (hopefully), the emergence of a multipolar political reality in the region. This vision is what lived on both in the struggles of Martin Luther King, and very explicitly in the struggle of Malcolm X and the Black Liberation and Black Nationalist movement. The assassination of Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth, with the support of the Confederate Secret Services, made the dismantling of this policy all the easier. However, well before his assassination, even Lincoln made attempts to backpedal on General Sherman’s vision of land reform. At the onset of this resettlement, Rufus Saxton, speaking to the Second African Baptist Church in Savannah in February 1865, reportedly told those who gathered:
“The soil is the source of all true prosperity and wealth, No people can be great unless they own soil. You know that; General Sherman knows it; our Father in heaven knows it. And now I want to tell you, you may own the soil.”
A few weeks later, President Abraham Lincoln signed into law a bill clarifying that Black families could rent their chosen plots for three years, with the option to buy them. Undercutting the message of both Saxon and Sherman. The Freedmen’s Bureau was also established with this bill, maybe as a kind of spoon full of sugar to help swallow the pill that was Lincoln’s clarification. This didn’t stop the 40,000+ Black Americans from traveling and settling within the borders of this “new state”. Post assassination, Andrew Johnson, slave owner, and outward white supremacist, fully rescinded on even the bruised version of reform left by Lincoln, strangling this fledgling Black State in its crib.
Read more:
obligatory plug for Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B. Du Bois
This meme format is truly Dave Anthony’s finest work.
