On this day, 140 years ago, a delegation of black religious leaders--most of them former slaves--met with General William T. Sherman in Savannah to discuss "matters relating to the freedmen of Georgia." Four days later, Sherman issued his famous Special Field Order 15, which ordered that former slaves be granted land, in plots of up to 40 acres, in a coastal area extending from Charleston, South Carolina, to north Florida. Within six months, perhaps 40,000 freedpeople lived on claims in the "Sherman reserve." Thus was born the idea, which persists to day, of a government promise of 40 acres of land to former slaves.
That meeting can teach us a number of things that I discuss below the fold (and fair warning--it's long).
I'm writing about that uncelebrated but important meeting for a number of reasons: first, as a tribute to those men, who in their meeting with Sherman testified eloquently about the meanings of slavery, freedom, and the Civil War; second, as an opportunity to explore the unexpected possibilities for, and ultimate limits on, revolutionary change in the midst of war; and finally, as a chance to reflect on how we think today about the history of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the South more generally (a subject that has occupied a number of recent diaries on dkos).
By way of background: Sherman had arrived at Savannah in December 1864, after his March to the Sea from Atlanta. Sherman's march had been celebrated by the North as a military success, but the general had come under considerable criticism for his soldiers' treatment of slaves along their route. Sherman--who had been hostile to emancipation and the enlistment of black troops--regarded the thousands of slaves who followed his troops as a nuisance and a hindrance; on one occasion, dozens had reportedly drowned while trying to cross a river, after US troops pulled up a pontoon bridge. Before Sherman launched his troops into South Carolina, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton visited Savannah and forced the general's meeting with the black leaders.
The 20 men who met with Sherman were a remarkable lot. All were ministers or lay leaders of their churches; most had been slaves before the Civil War, and many had been free for only a matter of weeks. The leader of the group was 67-year-old Garrison Frazier, who had been born a slave in North Carolina. Frazier, a minister for 35 years, had paid $1,000 before the war to buy his own freedom, and that of his wife. Frazier spoke for the group in answering a series of questions:
State what you understand by Slavery and the freedom that was to be given by the President's proclamation.
Answer--Slavery is, receiving by irresistible power the work of another man, and not by his consent. The freedom, as I understand it, promised by the proclamation, is taking us from under the yoke of bondage, and placing us where we could reap the fruit of our own labor, take care of ourselves and assist the Government in maintaining our freedom.
...
State in what manner you think you can take care of yourselves, and how can you best assist the Government in maintaining your freedom.
Answer: The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor--that is, by the labor of the women and children and old men; and we can soon maintain ourselves and have something to spare. And to assist the Government, the young men should enlist in the service of the Government, and serve in such manner as they may be wanted.... We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own.
(For more of the Q&A, see the website of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project .)
Frazier testified to a desire for land that was seemingly universal among former slaves in the South. Sherman, for his part, had little sympathy with freedpeople. Nonetheless, he saw in those aspirations a possible solution to the problems he had encountered in Georgia: by promising freedpeople land in the coastal regions, he hoped to dissuade them from following his army as he drove into the interior of the Carolinas. Thus, a confluence of forces--of freedpeople's actions and aspirations, of political pressure, and of military necessity--motivated his SFO 15. (Sherman's order made no mention of mules, but his soldiers often turned over animals that "broke down" along their route to freedpeople, who then nursed them back to health).
A similar confluence of forces had been responsible for the emergence of emancipation as an aim of the Union government during the war. Frazier and the other black leaders at the Savannah meeting understood that the war had not begun with the goal of ending slavery. "The object of the war was not at first to give the slaves their freedom," Frazier said, "but the sole object of the war was at first to bring the rebellious States back into the Union and their loyalty to the laws of the United States." Haltingly, during 1861-62, the US moved towards adopting emancipation as a war aim, with slaves pushing relentlessly in that direction. Even before the firing on Fort Sumter, they began running away and seeking refuge among the US troops whom their masters had declared the enemies of the South. The actions of those runaways reverberated from troops on the ground through the chain of command and to Washington, where a number of radical Republicans took a far earlier and stronger stance on ending slavery than Lincoln. Nonetheless, with his issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln signaled that the end of slavery had joined union as a fundamental aim of the US war effort; having made that commitment, he never wavered from it, and helped secure Congress's passage of the 13th amendment in February 1865.
Second only to emancipation itself, land redistribution had the power to fundamentally transform the social and economic structures of Southern society. Some slaves saw it as a recompense for decades of unpaid labor. Their idea of "compensation" --the forebear of modern calls for reparations--was very different from that imagined at the time by most white Americans, who typically spoke, if anything, of compensating slaveowners for the loss of their human property. In their desire for land after the Civil War, however, most former slaves looked not just to the past but also the future. They saw land, in Frazier's words, as "[t]he way we can best take care of ourselves"--as a means, that is, to get beyond the necessity of working as free laborers for the men who had once held them as slaves. Nor did they necessarily expect to be given land for free. As Frazier testified, "[w]e want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own." Pennsylvania Congressman Thaddeus Stevens--one of the few Northern Republicans to back land redistribution--saw a political benefit as well: by confiscating the land of wealthy aristocrats who had led the rebellion, the government would undermine the material basis for their privilege and political power.
Sherman's SFO 15 was at most a small step towards land redistribution; it applied only to a strip of the southeastern coast, and guaranteed freedpeople "possessory titles" to their plots only until Congress reviewed the issue. Before Congress could act, however, President Andrew Johnson began issuing pardons to wealthy landowners--many of them former secessionists--and ordered that their property in the Sherman reserve be restored. The task of enforcing that policy fell to General Oliver Otis Howard--formerly one of Sherman's subordinates, and now head of the Freedmen's Bureau. In the fall of 1865 Howard traveled to the sea islands of South Carolina for his own meetings with former slaves, who protested in vain that if the government "does not carry out the promises Its agents made to us" it would leave them at the mercy of "your late and [our] all time enemies." The offer of 40 acres--which had its roots in the Savannah meeting nine months earlier--thus entered US history as a promise betrayed.
What lessons can the Savannah meeting and its outcome teach us about the history of slavery, Civil War, and Reconstruction? I'm going to sidestep, very deliberately, two common interpretive approaches: first, the what-if questions ("what if Lincoln had lived?"); and second, the Monday-morning-quarterbacking questions ("should Lincoln have embraced emancipation earlier? should Reconstruction have been harsher or more lenient?"). Rather, I want to emphasize the importance of multiple historical actors--with different perspectives and different goals--and the interplay among them that shaped the course of events. Garrison Frazier and William Sherman had little in common, but both saw something positive in the offer of land to freedpeople, and both helped bring about SFO 15. More broadly, as I've noted, slaves played a crucial role in forcing the question of emancipation on reluctant military officers and federal officials during the Civil War. Whatever its commander's initial prejudices or priorities, Sherman's army became an army of liberation.
Freedpeople found, however, that those officers and officials were at best their temporary allies, and not their fast friends. During the war, most Northern Republicans put union first, and embraced emancipation when it seemed necessary to that goal; during Reconstruction, they viewed the task of promoting ex-slaves' freedom as secondary to the task of securing the supremacy of the federal government and the loyalty of the ex-Confederate states. They supported those measures--voting and civil rights--that they believed necessary to that goal, and eschewed those--such as land redistribution--that they did not. Freedpeople continued, individually and collectively, to pursue a landed independence after the fall of 1865, but they found fewer and fewer allies in the federal government.
The problem too often with popular discussions of this history is that they focus on a few figures--Lincoln, Johnson, Sherman, etc.--or collapse these complexities into simplistic generalizations--especially the North vs. the "South." I say this not out of a sense of professional superiority or jealousy, but because I feel strongly that bad history makes bad politics. And it's very rare to see discussions of the South in politics today that don't invoke history to some extent (which you typically don't see in discussions of other regions, like the Midwest or Mountain states). When I see a dkos diary about "the South" I know I'm likely to hear mostly if not entirely about the white South. When I read people repeating the old saw that the "South lost the war but won the peace," it's clear to me that they don't have Garrison Frazier in mind.
I don't mean to suggest that the only problem here is race (though much of it is). It's also that complex events get reduced to questions about the judgment or character of an individual--so that the coming of emancipation, for example, gets debated as a question of what Lincoln thought about slavery and race. This is not, let me emphasize, an argument that the great "dead white men" don't matter (that's always struck me as primarily a right-wing caricature anyway). Rather, it's an argument that they need to be understood as part of an historical process--one that connects Lincoln, for example, not just to other politicians and the northern public, but also to soldiers and officers in the field, and to runaway slaves. Recognize that, and it becomes less important to parse the every word of Lincoln, and more important to study those of Garrison Frazier. Plus, I have to tell you, it's a lot more fun.