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chapter 9 Reconstruction: The Making and Unmaking of a Revolution
other good and worthy citizens can give by taking hold of politics is needed in order 1865–1877
to keep the government out of bad hands and secure the ends for which governments
are formed.” 14

Land and Labor
Landownership was fundamental to former slaves’ aspirations for economic indepen-
dence. Rebuilding families as independent households required land. Speaking for his
people, particularly former slaves, in the summer of 1864, the AME missionary and
minister Richard Cain explained, “We must possess the soil, be the owner of lands
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and become independent.” This message was repeated in January 1865, when several
hundred blacks in the Sea Islands told General William T. Sherman, “We want to be
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placed on land until we are able to buy it, and make it our own.” As part of his Special
Field Order 15, Sherman settled more than 40,000 former slaves in coastal areas that had
been abandoned by Confederate plantation owners. Unfortunately, what was known
as Sherman’s Reserve did not last. The Reconstruction plans of President Abraham
Lincoln and his successor, Andrew Johnson, directed that former Confederates who
swore allegiance to the United States would regain their land, and unclaimed land was
auctioned to the highest bidder. Many former slaves were already working this land
under federal supervision; others had simply squatted on abandoned land and worked
it to sustain themselves. They were all evicted.
Although the Freedmen’s Bureau (1865–1872), the vital federal institution created
to assist the freedpeople in their transition to freedom, was able to help some enter into
contracts to rent the land they were already farming, the bureau was not able to help
them purchase land. Few freedpeople or free blacks possessed the clout, capital, or
credit to buy land, and as a result, they lost out to returning ex- Confederate plantation
owners and northern and southern investors. The Southern Homestead Act, passed
by Congress in 1866, made public land available to freedmen, but it had little impact
and was repealed a decade later. In the end, most land in the former Confederacy was
returned to white control, often to the original owners. The rest went to northern
white investors, former army officers, and Freedmen’s Bureau officials.
This “landless emancipation” devastated freedpeople. “Damm such freedom as
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that,” one angry freedman exclaimed, expressing the frustration of many. Freedpeople
believed that they had earned the right to own the land they and their ancestors had
worked as slaves. They argued that freedom without provision for self-sufficiency was
a shocking violation of the federal government’s economic and moral responsibility. A
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group of Mississippi blacks called it “a breach of faith on the part of the government.”
Some simply refused to leave the property they now considered their own. The former
slaves on the Taylor farm in Norfolk County, Virginia, mounted an armed resistance
when their former owners returned to reclaim their prewar property, but to no avail.
Forced evictions of freedpeople from land and farms they assumed now belonged to
them were common.

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