Download Forty Acres? The Question of Land at the War`s End

Forty Acres? The Question of Land at the War's End In this activity students consider different viewpoints on whether former slaves should be given land at the end of the Civil War. Students read
one of five primary sources and summarize the author's viewpoint. This activity makes a good introduction to a unit on Reconstruction or to sum
up a unit on the Civil War. This activity was designed to help students with language processing challenges synthesize historical documents.
Essential Question: What were the arguments for and against redistribution of land to former slaves at the end of the Civil War.
Instructions 1. Step 1: Discussion of the situation of former slaves at the end of the Civil War by reading The Union Redistributes
Abandoned Plantations. Note: The question of redistribution of land to freedmen was unsettled and that many
competing visions were in play.
2. Step 2: Please locate the worksheet and copies of "A Freedman and a General Discuss the Meaning of Freedom."
We will read the script, and this will serve as a model for what you will be doing with the other documents. You should
summarize the document on one of the sides of the house by completing the statement with the name of the speaker and
circling either "distributed" or "returned" and then explain why on the lines provided.
3. Step 3: You will be working in your groups of four. Each group member is responsible for one document.
Each student should read his/her document and fill in a space on the worksheet. Then group members should explain
their documents to each other and share their summarizing statements so that each member's worksheet is complete.
4. Step 4: GTS:
a.
What you think would be the best option at the end of the Civil War, and explain why.
b. Predict what will happen and how different factions (southern planters, freedpeople, Northern politicians) will
react.
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The Union Redistributes Abandoned Plantations
…On January 16, 1865, the history of the south Atlantic coast took a sudden dramatic turn—a turn that promised land
and independence to thousands of ex-slaves on the Sea Islands [Georgia and South Carolina].
The dramatic turn was the announcement by General William Tecumseh Sherman of Field Order Number 15, which
authorized ex-slaves to take possession of more than 400,000 acres of plantation land in an area extending thirty miles
inland along the Atlantic coast from South Carolina to Jacksonville, Florida. More than 40,000 slaves settled on
plantations abandoned by their Confederate owners, most on the Sea Islands.
Field Order Number Fifteen called for the possession of the land, but was deliberately unclear on the question of title.
That lack of clarity prompted a range of responses from freedpeople. Many assumed that possession meant ownership:
others understood that possession guaranteed nothing without a title. But with or without a title, possession excited the
hopes of ex-slaves for land ownership.
Two months later, in March 1865, Congress passed a bill creating the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and
Abandoned Land, known subsequently as the Freedmen’s Bureau. What the land provision of that bill stated falls
below:
To every male citizen, whether refugee [southern whites loyal to the union] or freedmen, there shall be assigned
not more than forty acres of land and the person to whom it was so assigned shall be protected in the use and
enjoyment of the land for three years. At the end of said term, or at any time during said term, the occupants of
any parcels so assigned may purchase the land and receive such title thereto as the United States can convey.
--Instructions by the U.S. CONGRESS to the Freedmen’s
Bureau to set aside land for freedmen and loyal white refugees,
March 1865
In response to Field Order Number Fifteen and the land provisions of the law establishing the Freedmen’s Bureau,
thousands of African Americans on the Sea Islands occupied lands that had been abandoned by Confederate planters or
seized by the Union. But on May 29, 1865, less than two months after the war ended, Andrew Johnson, who had become
president upon Lincoln’s assassination, dealt a devastating blow to the freedpeople’s dream of land ownership. He
announced a sweeping amnesty, which granted most planters and Confederate leaders full political rights and title to their
abandoned and confiscated lands.
Under the terms of President Johnson’s amnesty proclamation, planters returning to the Sea Islands had legal title to their
abandoned lands. But the fact of the matter was that ex-slaves held the land and were not about to give it up. The mood
of these former slaves was militant and determined. In the summer of 1865, Major Martin Delany, a fiery black military
officer who
was now an official of the Freedmen’s Bureau, addressed 600 freedpeople in a church on Saint Helena Island. He called
upon ex-slaves to defend their rights and land with military force…
The ex-slaves’ desire for land and the presence of armed African-American soldiers were an explosive combination.
Throughout 1865, reports persisted across the South of former slaves about land ownership and armed revolt. Agents of
the Freedmen’s Bureau on the scene hesitated to turn the land over to the original owners, and armed freedmen made
clear their intent to defend their farms.
Source: American Social History Project, Freedom’s Unfinished Revolution: An Inquiry in the Civil War and
Reconstruction, 163-16
Worksheet
Name ______________________ A Freedman and a General Discuss the Meanings of
Freedom
What exactly should be done for freedmen, if anything, was hotly debated in the years following the Civil War. As this exchange between a Union
military officer and a former slave in Arkansas shows, even the meaning of freedom was up for grabs.
FREEDMAN: Sir, I want you to help me in a personal matter.
GENERAL: Where is your family?
FREEDMAN: On the Red River.
GENERAL: Have you not everything you want?
FREEDMAN: No sir.
GENERAL: You are free!
FREEDMAN: Yes sir, you set me free, but you left me there.
GENERAL: What do you want?
FREEDMAN: I want some land; I am helpless; you do nothing for me but give me freedom.
GENERAL: Is not that enough?
FREEDMAN: It is enough for the present; but I cannot help myself unless I get some land; then I can take care of myself and
my family; otherwise I cannot do it.
SOURCE | Reported by the Joint Congressional Committee on Reconstruction, 1867; conversation took place at Fort Smith, Arkansas; in American Social History
Project, Freedom’s Unfinished Revolution: An Inquiry into the Civil War and Reconstruction, 255.
CREATOR | Various
ITEM TYPE | Government Document
Thaddeus Stevens Calls for Redistribution of
Confederate Land
On January 6, 1865, General William T. Sherman issued Special Field Order #15, which gave millions of acres of land along the Atlantic coast
to emancipated slaves, in lots of not more than 40 acres per family. In March 1865, Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania proposed
that all planter lands in the former Confederacy be confiscated and redistributed to ex-slaves and poor whites in forty-acre tracks. Stevens argued
that with money from the sale of the remaining confiscated land, the U.S. government could pay off its war debt and finance pensions for Union
soldiers and their families. His proposal found little support and was never even voted on by the full House of Representatives.
We especially insist that the property of the chief rebels should be seized and [used for] the payment of the national debt, caused
by the unjust and wicked war they instigated…
The whole fabric of southern society must be changed and never can it be done if this opportunity is lost. Without this, this
government can never be, as it has never been, a true republic…
Nothing is so likely to make a man a good citizen as to make him a freeholder [landowner]. Nothing will so multiply the
production of the South as to divide it into small farms. Nothing will make men so industrious and moral as to let them feel that
they are above want and are the owners of the soil which they till… No people will ever be republican in spirit and practice
where a few own immense manors and the masses are landless. Small and independent landholders are the support and
guardians of republican liberty.
SOURCE | American Social History Project, Freedom’s Unfinished Revolution: An Inquiry into the Civil War and Reconstruction, 253.
CREATOR | Thaddeus Stevens
ITEM TYPE | Speech
"James Hopkinson's Plantation. Planting Sweet
Potatoes"
Early in the Civil War, on November 7, 1861, a fleet of Union gunboats bombarded the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina. Confederate
planters left hastily, ordering their field hands and house servants to accompany them. Most ignored their former masters and remained. The
Union government eventually appointed northern antislavery reformers to manage the lands abandoned by the planters and to oversee the labor
of ex-slaves. These reformers wanted to demonstrate the superiority of free over slave labor in the cultivation of cotton. Most freedpeople,
however, did not want to grow cotton or produce for the market, preferring instead to grow corn, potatoes, and other subsistence crops. Henry P.
Moore, a native of New Hampshire who traveled to South Carolina during the Civil War, took this 1862 photograph after white planters had
already left Edisto island. Though Moore may have staged the people in the photo, the clothing, crops, tools, and wagon in the photograph were
all authentic.
Focus Questions
Why were freedpeople planting sweet potatoes instead of cotton?
SOURCE | Henry P. Moore, "James Hopkinson's Plantation. Planting Sweet Potatoes," photograph, 1862, New York Historical Society; from American Social
History Project, Freedom's Unfinished Revolution (New Press, 1996), p. 154.
CREATOR | Henry P. Moore
ITEM TYPE | Photograph
An Ex-Slave Protests Eviction from "the Promised Land"
In the speech below, Bayley Wyat, an ex-slave, protests the eviction of blacks from confiscated plantations in Virginia in 1866. Like so many
other nineteenth-century Americans, white and black, freed people wanted to work the land as self-sufficient farmers. Congress raised
expectations of landownership among ex-slaves when it passed the Freedmen's Bureau Bill, which contained a land provision stating that the
Bureau would redistribute lands abandoned by Confederate planters by leasing forty-acre tracts to freedmen and 'loyal white refugees.' But the
bill did not empower the Freedmen's Bureau to conduct large-scale confiscation. Rather than distribute land it didn't have, Bureau agents
persuaded reluctant freedmen to sign labor contracts with ex-slaveholders. President Johnson further dashed the hopes of freedmen for land.
Less than two months after the war ended, he issued a sweeping amnesty and began issuing individual pardons granting planters and
Confederate leaders title to lands abandoned or confiscated during the war.
We has a right to the land here we are located. For why? I tell you. Our wives, our children, our husbands, have been sold over
and over again to purchase the lands we now locate upon; for that reason we have a divine right to the land…Dey told us dese
lands was 'fiscated from the Rebs, who was fightin' de United States to keep us in slavery and to destroy the Government. De
Yankee officers say to us: "Now, dear friends, colored men, come and go with us; we will gain de victory, and by de
proclamation of our President you have your freedom, and you shall have the 'fiscated lands." And now we feels disappointed
dat dey has not kept deir promise. O educated men! men of principle, men of honor, as we once considered you was! Now we
don't seem to know what to consider, for de great confidence we had seems to be shaken, for now we has orders to leave dese
lands by the Superintender of the Bureau.….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 large cities in the North grow up on the cotton and the sugars and the rice that
we made!...I say they have grown rich, and my people are poor.
SOURCE | Bayley Wyat, A Freedman's speech. Philadelphia: Published by Friends' association of Philadelphia and its vicinity for the relief of
colored freedmen, circa 1866, Library of Congress, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.rbc/rbpe.1590140b.
CREATOR | Bayley Wyat
ITEM TYPE | Speech
A Southern Planter Argues that "the Negro Will Not
Work"
After the Civil War Confederate leaders and planters argued that their lands, confiscated by the Union army or abandoned during the war,
should be returned to them. Those who wanted freedmen to take over and cultivate the lands pointed to the success of former slaves in Port
Royal, South Carolina. There, former slaves took over farming of the lands abandoned by their masters in 1861. The following quote is from a
southern planter explaining to a journalist why such an idea would never work in Virginia or anywhere else.
The Negro will not work more than enough to supply his bare necessities… The Negro stands as much in need of a master to
guide him as a child does… The Negro will always need the care of someone superior to him, and unless in one form or another
it is extended to him, the race will first become pauper and then disappear. Nothing but the most careful legislation will prevent
it… What will the Negro do when he is called upon to support not only himself (he isn’t inclined to do that, and I don’t believe
he will do it), but also to get food, and clothes and [medicine] for the infants and disabled people belonging to him? Why, I
doubt if my farm ever returned me one percent interest on the capital invested in it. He cannot do it. He couldn’t do it if all the
Southern States were confiscated and given him to do it with.
SOURCE | Mr. K--- (Anonymous), 12 July 1865, quoted in John Richard Dennett, The South As It Is: 1865-1866 (republished, Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of
Alabama Press, 2010), 15.
CREATOR | Mr. K--- (Anonymous)
ITEM TYPE | Speech