the sea island experiment refers to

Port Royal Experiment

1861–1870s

The Port Royal Experiment, also called the Sea Island Experiment, was an early humanitarian effort to prepare the former slaves of the South Carolina Sea Islands for inclusion as free citizens in American public life. The Port Royal Experiment was made possible by the U.S. Navy’s conquest of the Sea Islands of Beaufort District after the naval victory at the Battle of Port Royal on November 7, 1861. The islands remained in Union hands until the end of the war. The conquest was so swift that Beaufort District planters abandoned most of their property and hurriedly evacuated inland. Most importantly, nearly ten thousand slaves were abandoned on island plantations. Still not legally considered free, the abandoned slaves were declared “contraband of war” and placed under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase sent his friend Edward L. Pierce of Boston to Port Royal to recommend measures to the federal government for dealing with the Sea Island “contrabands.” Reverend Mansfield French was dispatched to Port Royal at the same time as agent of the New York–based American Missionary Association to ascertain what help was needed for the Sea Island blacks. Both men arrived at Port Royal in January 1862.

The combination of federal efforts to assist and employ the Sea Island blacks and the efforts of several philanthropic and missionary organizations to prepare the “contrabands” for emancipation led to the Port Royal Experiment. While the federal government concentrated on employing the “contrabands” to harvest and process the valuable Sea Island cotton, philanthropic organizations and religious missionaries assumed the task of providing education, which the Sea Island blacks eagerly sought. Both the government and private charities provided food, clothing, and medical assistance. In February 1862 Pierce returned to Boston and helped organize the Educational Commission and to seek volunteers for this “experiment” in the Sea Islands. At the same time, the National Freedmen’s Relief Association in New York was collecting donations and enlisting volunteers to assist as well.

In March 1862 the steamer Atlantic brought the first contingent of these Boston and New York volunteers and philanthropists to Port Royal. Dubbed “Gideonites” by contemptuous Union soldiers, the volunteers were a mixed group of missionaries intent on teaching, organizing, evangelizing, or doing whatever good they could at Port Royal. Although diverse in their makeup, they were united by their fervent opposition to slavery and determination to help guide the liberated slaves of the Sea Islands. In April 1862 a second contingent of “Gideonites” arrived from Philadelphia, sponsored by that city’s Port Royal Relief Committee. Prominent among this contingent was Laura Towne, who would found the Penn School on St. Helena Island. These groups were the vanguard of scores of missionaries who came to the Sea Islands of Beaufort District during the Civil War.

The partnership between the federal government and various philanthropic agencies to carry out humanitarian enterprises among the Sea Island blacks continued throughout the war. Notable among their achievements was the establishment of private freedmen’s schools that continued a century and a half after the Port Royal Experiment ended. The Mather School on Port Royal Island survived until the 1960s, and the Penn School on St. Helena Island continued into the twenty-first century as the Penn Community Center.

On January 1, 1863, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation went into effect for the “contrabands” of the Sea Islands. Thereafter they were “freedmen” and entitled to many rights and responsibilities as citizens. This was the pinnacle of the Port Royal Experiment and a day of jubilation for Sea Island blacks.

Following emancipation, another effort of the Port Royal Experiment was the redistribution of abandoned plantation lands to the former slaves. Under the authority of the U.S. Direct Tax Act of 1862, most of the Sea Island plantations in Beaufort District were seized for nonpayment of taxes. Leaders of the Port Royal Experiment lobbied the federal government to distribute this land in small parcels to the freedmen. Of the 101,930 acres seized, approximately one-third was purchased on favorable terms by the freedmen. Much of Beaufort County retained the character of small black landholding into the twenty-first century.

On March 3, 1865, the federal government established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands within the War Department to deal with the humanitarian problems across the South at the close of the Civil War. Better known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, it was responsible for food, clothing, and medical relief as well as educational services for the freedmen. The first Freedmen’s Bureau office in South Carolina was opened in Beaufort in 1865, and many volunteers of the Port Royal Experiment became leaders of the agency. General Rufus Saxton, the military governor of the Sea Islands and a major supporter of the Port Royal Experiment, was the Freedman’s Bureau director for South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. The Freedman’s Bureau was the first humanitarian, or “welfare,” agency established by the U.S. government. The Freedman’s Bureau was officially disbanded in 1872, but the lingering influence of the Port Royal Experiment survived in Beaufort County’s unique landownership patterns and educational institutions.

Abbott, Martin. The Freedmen’s Bureau in South Carolina, 1865–1872. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967.

Forten, Charlotte L. The Journal of Charlotte Forten: A Free Negro in the Slave Era. 1953. Reprint, New York: Norton, 1981.

Holland, Rupert Sargent, ed. Letters and Diary of Laura Towne: Written from the Sea Islands of South Carolina, 1862–1884. 1912. Reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969.

Pearson, Elizabeth Ware, ed. Letters from Port Royal: Written at the Time of the Civil War. 1906. Reprint, New York: Arno, 1969.

Rose, Willie Lee. Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment. 1964. Reprint, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999.

Written by Lawrence S. Rowland

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Port royal experiment (1862-1865).

African Americans preparing cotton for gin, Port Royal, 1862

The Port Royal Experiment, the first major attempt by Northerners to reconstruct the Southern political and economic system, began only seven months after the firing on Fort Sumter. On November 7, 1861 the Union Army occupied South Carolina’s Sea Islands, freeing approximately 10,000 slaves. As the Confederate Army and white plantation owners fled, Northerners began to capitalize on their possession of an area world famous for its cotton. During the first year of occupation African American field hands harvested approximately 90,000 lbs. of the crop. The workers were paid $1 for every 400 pounds harvested and thus were the first former slaves freed by Union forces to earn wages for their labor.

In January of 1862 Union General Thomas W. Sherman requested teachers from the North to train the ex-slaves. Three months later U.S. Secretary of Treasury Salmon Chase appointed Boston, Massachusetts attorney Edward L. Pierce to begin the Port Royal Experiment, which would create schools and hospitals for ex-slaves and to allow them to buy and run plantations. That same month the steamship Atlantic left New York City, New York bound for Port Royal. On board were 53 missionaries including skilled teachers, ministers and doctors who had volunteered to help promote this experiment. In April The Port Royal Relief Committee of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania dispatched Laura Matilda Towne with funds to found the Penn School, one of the largest of the missionary schools created during the Port Royal Experiment.

In 1863 President Abraham Lincoln issued new land redistribution policies that allowed nearly 40,000 acres of abandoned Confederate plantations to be divided among 16,000 families of the “African race.” The freed people were to purchase the land at $1.25 per acre. Almost immediately local blacks bought about 2,000 acres of land. White Northerners also purchased land. Edward Philbrick, for example, bought 11 plantations that collectively covered 7,000 acres. His holdings supported 950 African Americans as tenant farmers. Union General Ormsby Mitchel granted African American islanders permission to found the town of Mitchelville on Hilton Head Island, the first of many all-black communities. By 1865 Mitchelville had 1,500 inhabitants.

As the Union moved closer to victory however, enthusiasm for the Port Royal Experiment began to wane. Many Northern whites, initially concerned about compensating African Americans for the injustices they had endured during slavery, now saw voting rights rather than land ownership as the key component to black progress. More conservative Northerners were increasingly uneasy about the precedent set by large scale land confiscation.

It was the death of President Abraham Lincoln in April 1865, however, that ended momentum for the experiment. The new president, Andrew Johnson, was determined to restore all lands back to their previous white owners. In the summer of 1865 he ordered Brigadier General Rufus Saxton to begin that process. Nonetheless not all white owners returned to the Sea Islands, and thousands of black landowners and their descendants continued to farm their lands until well into the 20th century.

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Source of the author's information:.

Akiko Ochiai, “The Port Royal Experiment Revisited: Northern Visions of Reconstruction and the Land Question,” The New England Quarterly 74.1 (2001): 94-117; Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964).

The Port Royal Experiment

By ben parten.

The Port Royal Experiment began when Union naval forces captured Port Royal and the surrounding South Carolina Sea Islands in November 1861. White planters abandoned their plantations which were taken over by freed slaves who began farming on self-surveyed plots. Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase sent Abolitionist Edward Lillie Pierce to assess conditions at Port Royal. Pierce reported in February 1862 that the former slaves were willing to work as free men and women. Pierce brought a task force of northern abolitionist missionaries, educators and doctors to oversee the development of the community at Port Royal. The militant zeal exhibited by these young abolitionists led to the derisive nickname, the Gideonites, given them by the army after the biblical Gideonites. Friction among the army, cotton agents and Gideonites resulted from the differing objectives of each group. For the Gideonites and the Federal government the Port Royal Experiment would be judged on whether prewar cotton yields obtained under the southern system of bondage could be obtained under the northern system of free labor. While they focused on work as a primary objective, the Gideonites introduced a comprehensive program of adult education and literacy. The army also recruited a volunteer regiment of United States Colored Troops from Port Royal, the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, which served successfully in combat. After completing his march through Georgia, Sherman issued an order in January 1865 confiscating all the land on the South Atlantic coastline from Charleston to Jacksonville, and thirty miles inland. The land was redistributed to freed men and women in 40 acre plots held through a possessory claim. However, following Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865 President Andrew Johnson began implementing his own reconstruction plan. In the process lands sold outright at public auction remained in freed men and women’s hands but those land redistributed by possessory claim were restored to former owners whose title had not been extinguished by the possessory claims, provided they paid taxes and received a pardon. It became clear that radical land distribution was not going to be part of Reconstruction and the Port Royal Experiment withered as reconstruction progressed. The effects of the Port Royal Experiment, combined with Port Royal’s isolation and large African American population, produced a black community that was largely self-sufficient and independent. Men and women worked, children went to school, and local issues were resolved at the cornerstone of the community, the church. The freed men and women of Port Royal also remained politically active until 1895, when South Carolina’s Constitutional Convention voted to disenfranchise African American voters. Thus, the Port Royal Experiment’s status as a model for Reconstruction did not end with the Port Royal Experiment. Well into the the post-war period it remained an exemplar of what might have been had Reconstruction not reversed its course and given way to the white supremacy of Southern home rule.

FREED SLAVES, 1862. A Union soldier with the slaves of Confederate general Thomas Fenwick Drayton, on Drayton's plantation in Hilton Head, South Carolina, during the American Civil War. Photographed by Henry P. Moore, May 1862.

Photograph Courtesy of: The Granger Collection # 0120449

The Port Royal Experiment was a humanitarian mission undergirded by economic necessity and military expediency. It was there, in Port Royal and the surrounding South Carolina Sea Islands, that African American slaves first tilled the soil as free laborers. This transformation defied expectations. Both white Southerners and white Northerners except, of course, abolitionists, assumed servitude to be the enslaved person’s natural position. Indolence and ignorance, so the stereotype went, prohibited the African-American worker from being integrated into a free labor system. The experience at Port Royal shattered such assumptions. It revealed that enslaved men and women, if given the opportunity, would work without the lash and develop into responsible citizens. Thus the Port Royal Experiment proved to be what scholar Willie Lee Rose has called a Rehearsal for Reconstruction, for as she maintained, Port Royal operated as vital staging ground where emancipation—and, therefore, the work of Reconstruction—could be tested.

“The Day of the Gun-Shoot at Bay Point”

On November 7, 1861, only seven months after the firing on Fort Sumter, Commodore Samuel Francis Du Pont steered a Union fleet into Port Royal Sound. His mission was to disable the Sound’s two fortifications, Forts Walker and Beauregard on Hilton Head Island and Bay Point respectively, and to lay claim to Port Royal. As the largest deep-water port between North Carolina and the Florida Coast, Port Royal was a natural base for the Union Navy’s South Atlantic fleet, the federal armada that would soon blockade the Deep South’s two prized Atlantic port cities, Charleston and Savannah. But Port Royal’s importance was twofold. In addition to its value as a seaport, it also operated as a vital entrepôt for the region’s famous sea island cotton. Attorney General Edward Bates proposed that if Port Royal could be taken and the surrounding islands secured, the U.S. government could confiscate the remaining cotton wares and sell them to Northern factories. The plan, he suggested, would supply an already beleaguered Treasury Department with ready cash. [1]

The battle was short-lived. The federal fleet pummeled the relatively small Fort Walker, causing the overmatched Confederate force at Fort Beauregard to lower their flag and flee. As Du Pont and his fleet crept slowly up river toward the town of Beaufort, home to some of the most elite members of South Carolina’s plantocracy, they found an abandoned landscape. Upon hearing the first guns around the corner at Bay Point, the area’s white inhabitants had taken flight; their plantations showed signs of a hurried escape. To the local planters, November 7 represented their greatest fear. The supposed “ninety-day war” arrived unannounced at their isolated doorsteps, disturbing, and ultimately ending, their formulaic cycle of planting, profit, and prestige. For their nearly 8,000 slaves, however, “the Day the Gun Shoot at Bay Point” represented something entirely different. [2] It was the day freedom came, and the enslaved men and women celebrated their perceived liberation by repudiating the symbols of their oppression. In what had to have been a moment tinctured with catharsis, “spontaneous acts of self-liberation” broke out on plantations across the islands. “Big houses” were ransacked, gins were destroyed, and, most important of all, self-surveyed plots were partitioned off for future homesteads. As their masters fled for the state’s interior, haunted by the thought of what would become of their old lives, the enslaved people of Port Royal rejoiced in their new lives and contemplated the possibilities that freedom might bring. [3]

Yet liberation was not so simple. Lincoln and his administration insisted that the institution of slavery would not be interfered with. They knew that any outright assault on slavery would make the war a fight for emancipation rather than a war for the preservation of the Union, potentially angering Northern conservatives and precipitating a disaffection of the border states. Major General Benjamin Franklin Butler, commanding officer at Fortress Monroe in Virginia, provided a convenient solution saturated in legal subtlety. In May of 1861, six months prior to the landing at Port Royal, Butler granted refuge to three runaway slaves being used in the Confederate war effort. A Confederate officer petitioned for their return, but, after learning that the enslaved men believed they would soon be sold south for military purposes, Butler refused. He declared the slaves “contrabands of war,” a term taken from international law that neither freed the slaves nor recognized their humanity. It merely placed them in the possession of the Federal government. The understanding that it was a war measure only, designed specifically to strike at the productive power of the Confederacy, pacified those Northern conservatives and border states Lincoln dared not alienate. The Confiscation Act of 1861, passed later that August, codified Butler’s contrabands initiative into government policy. The act authorized the seizure of any property, including slaves, being used to aid the Confederates. Thus the enslaved men and women at Port Royal, while free in effect, were formally classified as contrabands, binding them to a liminal state between freedom and bondage. [4]

Salmon Portland Chase, Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury, wasted no time in fulfilling the second half of the Port Royal mission. He immediately dispatched Colonel William H. Reynolds to Beaufort, instructing him to commandeer the remaining cotton wares. But Chase had an idea. As an abolitionist who had made a legal career out of defending fugitive slaves, he knew that certain abolitionists in the North were hoping that the circumstances of Port Royal could be used to advance the cause of black freedom. He also knew that next year’s cotton crop, which he again hoped would help replenish the Treasury Department’s depleted coffers, depended on a working labor force. Therefore, out of his own abolitionist leanings and sense of economic opportunism, he called on Edward Lillie Pierce, the man who had supervised the refugees at Fortress Monroe, and instructed him to go to Port Royal. Pierce’s task was first, to assess the slaves’ conditions, and, second, to see if they would be willing to go back to work.

Pierce filed his official report in February of the following year. In it, he acknowledged that the slaves’ conditions were wanting, but he enthusiastically maintained that they prized their freedom and were quite willing to work . If “properly organized” with “proper motives,” he concluded that “as freemen,” the slaves “would be as industrious as any race of men are likely to be in this climate.” [5] He used the report to propose his own solution. The best course of action, he argued, would be the creation of a free labor enterprise, where white superintendents would manage cotton cultivation and establish schools for the slaves. The freed people would continue working but with two major modifications to the labor regime: they would work as individuals or in family units rather than in gangs and they would be paid for their labor. Pierce’s proposal, at least in his mind, expedited the process of emancipation. If his initiative succeeded, could the government re-enslave men and women proven fit for freedom? If the Government endeavored not to re-enslave them, how could they then justify the continued enslavement of African Americans outside of Port Royal? Secretary Chase, delighted with the report, supported Pierce’s initiative and coordinated a meeting between Pierce and President Lincoln. Though seemingly irritated with Pierce’s zeal, Lincoln acquiesced, giving Chase the authority to instruct Pierce as he wished. Though technically still classified as contraband, the enslaved men and women of Port Royal would henceforth be free men and women according to the terms of the newly christened Port Royal Experiment. [6]

The Gideonites

While Chase fully supported the initiative, there was an additional element of Pierce’s proposal that lay beyond his ability to fund. Pierce had plans to ferry a task force of Northern missionaries, educators, and doctors, whose jobs would be to oversee the creation of Freedman’s schools and houses of worship, provide for the health and well- being of the freed men and women, and, in some cases, to act as plantation superintendents, down to the islands. Chase could ensure their travel and requisition supplies, but he could not fund their entire endeavor. Federal compensation was out of the question, for reasons both political and financial, meaning that Pierce would have to find participants whose own zealous idealism was incentive enough. The member lists of Northern abolitionist and anti-slavery societies were thus the most logical places to look. If the government was interested in only labor and the cotton it produced, Pierce knew that the abolitionists would treat the formerly enslaved with goodwill and institute programs of social uplift, setting their sights on not just free labor but full citizenship and beyond. [7]

Fortunately, some of Boston’s most well respected abolitionists, many of whom knew Pierce personally, agreed to financially support the project at Pierce’s behest. Reverend Mansfield French, a clergyman commissioned to Port Royal by the American Missionary Association (AMA), met Pierce while on the coast and pledged his support for the project. Using his connections with the AMA, French secured patronage from New York’s abolitionist community and created a National Freedman’s Relief Association in the process. Before long, their benefactors in both Boston and New York provided Pierce and French a list of well-qualified recruits from which to choose.

The eager recruits were mostly young, well-educated professionals who had come of age in the 1850s. As a result, for many of the recruits, practical fact rather than moral fervor characterized their experience with abolitionism. They viewed slavery not in the Garrisonian view, which deemed it the most abhorrent of sins, but through the lens of the Free Soil Movement, causing them to understand slavery as a competing system of labor that impeded national progress. Emancipation, they maintained, should thus be approached rationally and done in a way that affirmed certain Northern precepts like the superior productivity of free labor and the value of individual enterprise. [8] Not all of the recruits, however, adhered to this vision. In fact, competing ideals divided much of the group. Some, particularly the older, more evangelical recruits, viewed Port Royal as the culmination of their moral harangues. Accordingly, these men and women felt that their work should better reflect their convictions, which meant that they prioritized humanitarian relief and religious instruction over the promotion of a free labor ethic. This deep internal fissure split the group between its more evangelical members and its adherents to liberal Christianity—a division which Willie Lee Rose suggests “was nothing more than a projection of the cleavages that had developed in American abolitionism.” Overcoming these cleavages would be on ongoing struggle, one that was never quite resolved. [9]

Nevertheless, on March 3 rd , 1862, fifty-three New Yorkers and thirty-five Bostonians from disparate backgrounds, professions, and denominations all boarded a steamer bound for the South Carolina coast where they would soon embrace a derisive nickname fashioned for them by the army. Like the biblical Gideonites that came before them, the Northerners were determined to carry their divine commission forward, not allowing their great task to diminish their “militant zeal.” [10]

The Gideonites’ early days at Port Royal constituted a steep learning curve. Not only were they new to their surroundings, but those assigned superintendent positions had little experience with plantation management. They struggled to organize themselves, on one hand, and to convince the freed men and women to return to cotton cultivation on the other. To make matters worse, the white Northerners already on the islands provided very little help. From the moment the first gun-boat landed, the army opposed the slaves they had effectively freed. The reasons varied. Some soldiers believed the slaves to be an impediment to military operations, while others were simply racist, and their racism, combined with some of the soldiers’ own depravity, precipitated a number of crimes against the former slaves. The soldiers exacted a similar, though not quite as base, hostility to the Gideonites, who the soldiers perceived as nothing more than meddling do-gooders.

The zero-sum battle over the islands’ supplies created another confrontation. Under orders to requisition not just the cotton but any salable merchandise adorning the plantations, William Reynolds’s team of cotton agents, according to the common Gideonite charge, purposely obstructed their humanitarian work. It did not help matters that the Gideonites were such poor cotton planters and managers. The agents, many of whom were veterans of the cotton trade, believed the missionaries to be unfit for cotton cultivation and too idealistic toward the freed people. In the end, Reynolds and Pierce, as representatives of their separate missions, fought for Port Royal supremacy, with Chase being the ultimate arbiter. But Secretary Chase decided to wait it out, for Reynolds’s mission would soon be over. The contest over authority would thus continue, with each of the three governmental bodies—the army, the cotton agents, and the Gideonites—believing their objectives should supersede those of the others.

The Freed Men and Women

Cotton cultivation, according to the U.S. government and many of the Gideonites, would be the barometer by which the Port Royal Experiment would be judged. The rationale was simple. A return to prewar cotton yields under a free labor regime would, for one, be proof of free labor’s productive might and, secondly would discredit the notion that cotton could only be efficiently produced if underpinned by a system of bondage. The freedmen and women, however, were reluctant to return to the old staple, presenting a problem for the Gideonites, particularly those who became plantation superintendents. The formerly enslaved men and women viewed cotton, like the plantation homes they sacked and the gins they disabled, as a symbol of their suffering and sought, instead, to ensure both their subsistence and autonomy by planting non-commercial staples like corn and sweet potatoes. Laura Towne, a moral crusader and member of a successive wave of Gideonites from Philadelphia, remembers the freedmen and women “begging Mr. Pierce to the let them plant and tend to corn” rather than cotton, for, as she pointed out, they knew that “their corn has kept them from starvation.” [11] A return to cotton planting, therefore, became the subject of ongoing labor negotiations, with each plantation developing its own expectations and standards for not just how much cotton would be worked but how, when, and where, this cotton would be produced.

The negotiations represented a contest between two competing conceptions of free labor. The former slaves believed their de facto emancipation guaranteed their economic autonomy. As autonomous agents, free to determine their own economic lives, the freed men and women desired to work on their own time and according to their own practices. Wages, the supposed universal incentive propelling production, were cast aside as trivial by many of the freed men and women as their own subsistence proved to be the primary catalyst behind their labor. That the Freed people could have “done so much as they have this year without any definite promise of payment” shocked Edward Philbrick, a particularly paternal and economically minded Bostonian Gideonite. [12] Northerners like Philbrick could not disassociate themselves from the joint Protestant-capitalist ethic in which they had been indoctrinated. Free labor, for them (primarily the troop’s younger and less evangelical members) was not simply a system for freemen but a system that made men free by producing liberation out of subordination. They posited that the free labor system instilled in one the discipline, thrift, and respect for rank and order needed to first attain independence and then preserve it. And because independence begets citizenship, the Northerners’ understood their free labor system to be indispensable to the perpetuation of American democracy.

An outright rejection of the Northern conception of free labor would, by default, be a rejection of a burgeoning American ethic, invalidating the Port Royal mission and discrediting the republican vision the North hoped would be the foundation of the reconstructed South. [13] Therefore, persuading the freed men and women to adopt a labor regime that, if nothing else, resembled the free labor system of the North was of the utmost importance. The labor negotiations were thus not simply about who would work or how one would work but of which republican vision would prevail. Winning the war of ideas hung in the balance, and the freed people of Port Royal had, for the first time ever, a say in not only how their labor would be used but in what the future of their country would look like. Though their hope for economic autonomy would not be immediately realized, by acquiescing to the Gideonites’ veiled paternalism and grudgingly agreeing to return to cotton in some capacity, the freed men and women of Port Royal threw their weight behind a free labor future, levying a decisive blow to the plantation South’s ideological superstructure in the process.

While establishing a level of good will between the white superintendents and the black laborers was a process in the making, an almost instantaneous bond germinated between the white educators and the former slaves. Gideonites William Channing Gannett and Edward Everett Hale observed that, when offered, the alphabet operated as a “talisman” that secured confidence of the freed people, whom, they claimed, expressed an “enthusiastic readiness” for literacy. According to Gannett and Hale, the freed men and women, while purposely kept in a state of ignorance, “knew of the power of letters” and desired to “share such a power.” [14] Creating a pervasive and effective educational program, though, would come slowly. Over time, four different approaches emerged. One approach developed in the Sabbath School, the Port Royal reincarnation of the traditional Sunday school. The only difference was that the classes promoted literacy by way of scriptural study. Another approach was the more standard mixed class, given its name because, while typically only attended by children, it remained open to adults. These classes functioned as day programs that replicated the traditional school environment. A third and far less formal approach occurred when freed men and women demanded individual instruction. In these instances, the white educators would invite the freedmen and women into their homes for private lessons or become itinerant tutors, visiting each freedman or woman’s home upon request.

The fourth and most common approach catered to the specific exigencies of the Port Royal Experiment. Work remained the primary objective, which made any sort of comprehensive program for adult education a difficult task. Therefore, to circumvent the restrictions work placed on the freedmen and women’s educational opportunities, night classes were held as often as three times a week. The sessions started, in some cases, as early as four in the afternoon and ended as late as nine. But even on the nights that did not have a scheduled class, evening education still frequently occurred. [15] Free of the labor responsibilities they had previously known, “nearly every school-child,” became “a teacher in the family,” bringing the lessons he or she learned that day back into their own homes. [16] The freed people saw literacy as a pivotal means of self-protection, but literacy, by itself, was, and is still, not entirely sufficient enough to ensure complete protection. It was, however, the most accessible step toward personal independence. Land ownership, what they believed to be the most critical ingredient to their own freedom, remained, for the time being at least, simply out of their hands.

The issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, altered the course of the Port Royal Experiment. Not only did it grant legal freedom to the already freed men and women of the islands, it authorized the enlistment of black soldiers into the U.S. Army. But for many of the freed men and women, an attempt to incorporate black soldiers into the armed forces was nothing new. On May 9, 1862, Union General David Hunter, commander of the Department of the South, boldly declared the slaves of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida free men. As an addendum to his initial declaration, he ordered all the able bodied men of Port Royal and the surrounding islands to Hilton Head, where they were to be drilled and trained as soldiers. Without any directive from Washington, Hunter instituted his own version of the draft. While many of the former slaves acquiesced, others, particularly the freedmen’s wives, were fraught with panic, thinking that the army had secret plans to sell them to Cuba. The Gideonites fumed with rage. Conscripting the able men, they protested, would drastically reduce the size of their labor force, undermining their attempts to both foster a free labor environment and resurrect Port Royal’s cotton economy. President Lincoln rescinded Hunter’s premature Emancipation Proclamation, but Hunter’s regiment of 500 former slaves continued drilling throughout the summer of 1862 without so much as a word from Washington. Unable to provide a steady wage for his men, Hunter eventually had to disband his troop in early August. [17]

Earlier that April, Secretary of War Edwin McMasters Stanton appointed Brigadier General Rufus Saxton the Military Governor of the Department of the South. The title placed the affairs of both the army and the Port Royal Experiment under his command, which Secretaries Chase and Stanton believed, would only make the Port Royal Experiment stronger by giving it the formal backing of War Department. The move ensured that the contentious power plays between the army, the Gideonites, and the Cotton agents would be no more as the army and Gideonites were now consolidated, at least in theory, into one body.

Saxton, the son of a famous abolitionist writer and a noted anti-slavery man in his own right, hoped to pick up where Hunter left off. In late August, only a few weeks after Hunter demobilized his conscripted regiment, Saxton sent Mansfield French and Robert Smalls, an escaped former slave, and the eventual political leader of the Port Royal community, who famously piloted the Confederate Steamer Planter out of Charleston harbor and into the hands of the U.S. Navy, to Washington. Their orders were to persuade Stanton and Chase to authorize the raising of a new regiment of freedmen, which they did, possibly because both Stanton and Chase knew of Lincoln’s emancipation proposals already in the works. Stanton could now outfit, arm, and, most importantly, pay a new division of black soldiers, but unlike Hunter, Saxton had no plans to impress anyone into service. The only men enlisted would be men who were willing to fight. While many of the freed men and women reacted just as they had to Hunter’s declaration, by the end of the year, he had built a fighting force of close to 800 men, many of whom, it should be noted, were freed men from occupied islands in Georgia, Florida, and elsewhere in South Carolina as well.

The Gideonites, too, initially reacted just they did before, but after witnessing both Saxton’s recruiting successes and his good will toward the freedmen, many of the most skeptical Gideonites came to view the soldiers with pride. They recognized that, in the debates over the freedmen and women that were to come, military service would be a national symbol of black freedom and independence. The freedmen’s success on the battlefield did nothing to discourage the Gideonites, Saxton and his fellow officers, or the freedmen and women of Port Royal themselves. In the summer, Hunter’s old regiment stood toe to toe with Confederate guerilla fighters on an excursion to the Georgia coast. In November, the Port Royal regiment, the 1 st South Carolina Volunteers, returned to the Georgia sea islands, destroying Confederate works and taking a number of prisoners. Their success spoke for itself. Bearing arms gave the freed men a sense of manhood, self-worth, and independence, and, from the perspective of the federal government, it also hastened the war’s end as it equipped the Union army with a new, and as the Georgia excursions revealed, lethal fighting force. [18]

Land Redistribution and Sherman’s Field Order 15

The Port Royal Experiment was not an isolated endeavor. It sent shockwaves throughout the region and induced slaves to flee toward the coast, resisting their masters and risking their lives in the process. The hope was that freedom would be awaiting them there. Historian Joel Williamson surmises that by the summer of 1862 nearly three thousand refugee slaves had evaded capture and found their way into the occupied islands. By the end of the war, he suggested, “at least thirty thousand” had infiltrated the expanded occupied territories, now stretching sporadically from the outskirts of Charleston to the Savannah River. The large majority of whom, he concludes, were inland refugees. The experiment, in a word, was growing, taxing the management skills of the Gideonites even further. [19]

Permanent settlement was also a question. Despite all that had been accomplished, the Port Royal Experiment would eventually have to cease being an experiment. For Saxton, the freedmen and women, and the Gideonites, the desired outcome featured the resettlement of Port Royal’s freedmen and women as independent landowners. To the missionaries, appropriating the abandoned plantations and dividing then among the freed people represented the only just recompense for the many years they labored there under the lash. The first major step in this direction occurred in June of 1862 when Congress passed a direct tax on the states resisting the civil authority of the United States Government. The tax supplemented a previous act which, in an effort to raise revenue for the war effort, levied a general tax on each state. The 1862 tax also outlined a program wherein tax commissioners were to travel to the states in rebellion and evaluate how much each estate owed based on their property holdings. If the sum, plus an additional delinquent penalty, went unpaid after sixty days’ notice, the commissioners were to confiscate the land and offer it at a public sale.

At first, much of the confiscated land had been encompassed in the Port Royal Experiment. The freedmen and women, many of whom had been the slaves of the original land owners, continued to till the land while the missionaries supervised their work. But by February of 1863, the Federal government decided that the lands should be sold as outlined in the 1862 tax act. In response, three different positions emerged as to how to go about the land sales. The first camp, led by Saxton and supported by a majority of the Gideonites, argued that the land should first be offered exclusively to the freed men and women, who, after an initial deposit, could finance the remaining payments. The contrasting position, led by the tax commissioners sent to evaluate the land, maintained that the property should be sold outright to the highest bidder, whomever that may be. The existential danger of their position, Saxton and the Gideonites protested, was that if sold outright by the treasury department, the land would find its way into the hands of speculators looking to position themselves at the fore of the Sea Islands’ post-war cotton economy. Edward S. Philbrick, a Bostonian businessman and early Gideonite, offered a third position. He argued that the freed people were still unfit for independent landownership. The freed people should thus submit themselves to the paternal oversight of the Gideonites, who, according to Philbrick’s plan, would buy the land and then resale it to the freed people once they were prepared for independence. By what metric Philbrick would judge when they were ready to own the land remains unknown.

The government, however, stuck to the original dictates of the 1862 tax act. The land was to be sold to highest bidder with no questions asked. But Saxton, distressed by how destructive the sales would be to the Port Royal Experiment’s existence, appealed to his superiors and managed to stall the sales based on “military necessity.” Yet despite Saxton’s efforts to stall the sales, the tax commissioners convinced the Federal Government to go through with the sale of forty-seven of the one hundred and ninety-seven confiscated plantations. Of the forty-seven plantations sold, six were sold to freed people (all but one of those six were bought by groups of freedmen and women who had pooled their money together). Eleven were bought by Philbrick, who later subdivided and resold them to a number of freed families and groups of freed men and women. The remaining plantations, some thirty in all, found their way into the hands of speculators. [20]

Yet, when compared to the revolutionary ramifications of Sherman’s Special Field Order 15, the confiscated land sales appear almost inconsequential. Issued on January 16, 1865, less than a month after Sherman completed his famous march through Georgia, Sherman’s Special Field Order 15 confiscated the South Atlantic coastline, from Charleston to the St. Johns River in Jacksonville, ranging from the waters’ edge to thirty miles inland and ordered it to be redistributed to the freed men and women in forty acre plots. To Sherman, the order solved a problem. As he had marched through Georgia, as many as 17,000 refugee slaves had abandoned their homes and followed him to the coast. [21] The confiscated lands known as the Sherman reserve provided those refugees a home, and as Sherman understood it, ensured that they would not encumber him on his march north through the Carolinas. [22]

The stipulations in Sherman’s order resembled the plan Saxton envisioned for the forty-seven plantations sold at public auction. According to the field order, freed families could pre-empt a plot of land at a reasonable price. Settlement would be overseen by military officials who, until a formal title could be written, would provide the freed families a possessory claim to the land. More importantly, however, the order mandated that no white person, unless he or she served as a military or governmental official, should reside on the lands, which meant, of course, that land speculators would not be allowed to intervene. Congress codified the Sherman program into federal law when it passed the Freedman’s Bureau Bill in March 1865. [23]

However, the success of the settlement program would be short-lived. Following Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, Andrew Johnson, who had already shown signs of being conciliatory to former Confederates, began reneging on the government’s commitment to settlement. Removing white landholders from their title for the sake of African American freedom did not fit into Johnson’s conservative and white supremacist vision of national reconstruction. So long as former Confederates acknowledged emancipation and accepted the primacy of the federal government, he was content to grant amnesty and restore their property, except for the freed people. According to the Johnson plan, Reconstruction was to be short, swift, and dedicated to reconciliation rather than revolutionary social change, leaving the future of the abandoned lands in question.

Over time, however, Johnson’s policy became clear. The lands sold outright at public auctions were safe, but those included in the Sherman reserve were to be restored to their former owners once he or she paid the tax and received a pardon. After all, the freed people who inhabited land within the Sherman reserve only held possessory claims to the land. Legal title remained with the original landholders. Caught between the prerogatives of the president and the protestations of the freed people they had dedicated themselves to, Saxton, the man charged with overseeing land redistribution, and Oliver Otis Howard, the new head of the Freedman’s Bureau, could only stall the restoration process. Their hope was that once Congress convened at the first of the year, the Radical Republicans would be able to both renew and fortify the Freedman’s Bureau Bill, giving it the authority needed to thwart Johnson’s policies. Johnson, however, would not be out maneuvered so easily. In February 1866, he vetoed the bill. Though the radicals repassed the bill later that spring and this time, overrode Johnson’s veto, the new version of the bill lacked the injunctions needed to stop restorations and secure titles for the freed people. The message was understood: Congress, the federal government, and, indeed, the American people were not prepared to make radical land distribution a pillar of reconstruction, signaling to the people at Port Royal that the experiment had entered its final days.

Intense disillusionment set in on both sides. Some of the freedmen and women lost trust in the white missionaries, and Gideonites believed much of their work to have been in vain. Even the educators, who, of all the Gideonites, witnessed the remarkable gains of freedom on a daily basis, were disheartened. The radical takeover of Reconstruction in 1867 revitalized the Port Royalists, but by then, the battle over land redistribution had already been lost. And while the Radical Republicans succeeded in pushing landmark civil rights legislation through Congress, the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments proved fatal for the humanitarian work being done on the sea islands. With African Americans now armed with citizenship and the franchise, Northern support for efforts like the Port Royal Experiment withered. As Rose puts it, “the national obligation to the freedmen had been fulfilled.” [24] One by one the Gideonites left the sea islands.

Contrary to what many may have felt at the time, however, the work at Port Royal had not been in vain. True, Port Royal was subject to the tragic trajectory of Reconstruction, but gains had been made. The effects of the Port Royal Experiment, combined with Port Royal’s isolation and large African American population, produced a black community that was largely self-sufficient and independent. Men and women worked, children went to school, and local issues were resolved at the cornerstone of the community, the church. Taking their cue from their unabashed leader, Robert Smalls, the freed men and women of Port Royal also remained politically active until 1895, when South Carolina’s Constitutional Convention voted to disenfranchise African American voters. Thus, Port Royal’s status as a model for Reconstruction did not end with the Port Royal Experiment. Well into the post-war period it remained an exemplar of what might have been had Reconstruction not reversed its course and given way to the white supremacy of Southern home rule.

[1] Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 5–6; Orville Vernon Burton, Wilbur Cross, and Emory Campbell, Penn Center: A History Preserved (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014), 9–13.
[2] Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction , 17.
[3] Burton, Cross, and Campbell, Penn Center , 10.
[4] James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 93–99.
[5] United States. Department of the Treasury and Edward Lillie Pierce, The Freedmen of Port Royal, South-Carolina. Official Reports of Edward L. Pierce (New York: Rebellion Record, 1863), 308.
[6] Joel Williamson, After Slavery: The Negro in South Carolina during Reconstruction, 1861-1877 , Norton Library ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), 9.
[7] Akiko Ochiai, “The Port Royal Experiment Revisited: Northern Visions of Reconstruction and the Land Question,” The New England Quarterly 74, no. 1 (2001): 94–95.
[8] Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction , 37–40.
[9] Ibid., 73.
[10] Ibid., 47.
[11] Rupert Sargent Holland, ed., Letters and Diary of Laura M. Towne Written from the Sea Islands of South Carolina (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1912), 21.
[12] Edward Philbrick to Edward Atkinson May 25, 1862, in Elizabeth Ware Pearson, ed. Letters from Port Royal Written at the Time of the Civil War (Boston, MA: W. B. Clarke Company, 1906), 56; James A. Porter, Modern Negro Art (The American Negro, His History and Literature) (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 56.
[13] See Susan-Mary Grant, North over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000).
[14] [William C. Gannett and E. E. Hale] "Education of the Freedmen," The North American Review 101, no. 209 (October 1865): 533. The author(s) of this article, as well as “The Freedmen at Port Royal,” The North American Review 101, no. 208(July 1865), is unknown, but John R. Rachel indicates that it is co-written by Gannett and Hale. Therefore, this essay will also attribute authorship to Gannett and Hale. See John R. Rachal, “Gideonites and Freedmen: Adult Literacy Education at Port Royal, 1862-1865,” The Journal of Negro Education 55, no. 4 (1986): 453-469.
[15] John R. Rachal, “Gideonites and Freedmen: Adult Literacy Education at Port Royal, 1862-1865,” The Journal of Negro Education 55, no. 4 (1986): 463–4.
[16] [William C. Gannett and E. E. Hale] “The Freedmen at Port Royal,” The North American Review 101, no. 208 (July 1865), 4.
[17] Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction , 189.
[18] Ibid., 188–94.
[19] Williamson, After Slavery , 4–5.
[20] Ibid., 55–56.
[21] United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 128 vols. (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880-1901), Series I, volume 44, p. 75, 159.
[22] Eric Foner, Reconstruction, 1863-1877: America’s Unfinished Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 70–71.
[23] Williamson, After Slavery , 59–62.
[24] Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction , 389.

If you can read only one book:

Rose, Willie Lee. Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment . New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.

The Port Royal Experiment Essay
The Port Royal Experiment Resources
Author's Biography Ben Parten

Burton, Orville Vernon, Wilbur Cross, and Emory Campbell. Penn Center: A History Preserved . Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014.

Dougherty, Kevin. The Port Royal Experiment: A Case Study in Development. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014.

Foner, Eric. Reconstruction, 1863-1877: America’s Unfinished Revolution . New York: Harper & Row, 1988.

Gannett, William C. and E. E. Hale. “The Freedmen at Port Royal,” The North American Review 101, no. 208 (July 1865): 1-28.

———. "Education of the Freedmen," The North American Review 101, no. 209 (October 1865): 528-550.

Holland, Rupert Sargent, ed. Letters and Diary of Laura M. Towne, Written from the Sea Islands of South Carolina, 1862-1884 . Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1912.

Oakes, James. Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 . New York: W. W. Norton, 2013.

Ochiai, Akiko. “The Port Royal Experiment Revisited: Northern Visions of Reconstruction and the Land Question.” The New England Quarterly 74, no. 1 (2001): 94–117.

Pearson, Elizabeth Ware ed. Letters from Port Royal Written at the Time of the Civil War. Boston: W. B. Clarke Company, 1906.

Rachal, John R. “Gideonites and Freedmen: Adult Literacy Education at Port Royal, 1862-1865.” The Journal of Negro Education 55, no. 4 (1986): 453–69.

United States. Department of the Treasury and Edward Lillie Pierce. The Freedmen of Port Royal, South-Carolina. Official Reports of Edward L. Pierce . New York: Rebellion Record, 1863.

Williamson, Joel. After Slavery: The Negro in South Carolina during Reconstruction, 1861-1877 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965).

Organizations:

Penn Center

Penn Center is the site of a former school of the Port Royal Experiment and a heritage center for the Sea Islands.

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Web Resources:

The Civil War Women’s Port Royal experiment is a brief summary of the Port Royal Experiment.

The Port Royal Experiment is a brief documentary produced by A. J. Koelker.

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Voices of the Civil War Episode 9: “Port Royal Experiment

This is a short YouTube video on the Port Royal Experiment.

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Port Royal Experiment

The port royal experiment (1862 – 1865).

African Americans Preparing Cotton for Gin at Port Royal, 1862 Image Courtesy of the Library of Congress

In January of 1862 Union General Thomas West Sherman requested teachers from the North to train the ex-slaves. Three months later U.S. Secretary of Treasury Salmon Chase appointed Boston attorney Edward L. Pierce to begin the Port Royal Experiment, which would create schools and hospitals for ex-slaves and to allow them to buy and run plantations. That same month the steamship Atlantic left New York City bound for Port Royal. On board were 53 missionaries including skilled teachers, ministers and doctors who had volunteered to help promote this experiment. In April The Port Royal Relief Committee of Philadelphia dispatched Laura Matilda Towne with funds to found the Penn School, one of the largest of the missionary schools created during the Port Royal Experiment.

It was the death of President Abraham Lincoln in April 1865, however, that ended momentum for the experiment. The new president, Andrew Johnson, was determined to restore all lands back to their previous white owners. In the summer of 1865 he ordered Brigadier General Rufus Saxton , an abolitionist, to begin that process. Nonetheless not all white owners returned to the Sea Islands, and thousands of black landowners and their descendants continued to farm their lands until well into the 20th century.

For More Information :

Ochiai, A. (2001). The Port Royal Experiment Revisited : Northern Visions of Reconstruction and the Land Question. The New England Quarterly, 74 (1), 94-117. doi:10.2307/3185461

Rose, W. L. (1976). Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment. (New York: Oxford University Press).

Republished with permission from: BlackPast.org

How to Cite this Article (APA Format): Jackson, J. (n.d.). The Port Royal experiment (1862 – 1865). Social Welfare History Project. Retrieved from https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/eras/civil-war-reconstruction/port-royal-experiment/

2 Replies to “Port Royal Experiment”

The General that requested help from northerners with the Freedman was Thomas West Sherman, not William T. Sherman although they may have been related.

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Beaufort & the Port Royal Experiment

A new beginning

The Port Royal Experiment started just seven months after the first shots of the Civil War were heard. Beaufort and its sea islands were occupied by the Union Army by November 7, 1861, thus freeing its slaves. Beaufort quickly became the epicenter for Reconstruction after Confederate soldiers and plantation owners fled the area, leaving 200 sea island plantations and 10,000 slaves abandoned. Having no resources or direction, former slaves looked to the Union Army for support. Union officials oversaw the harvesting of approximately 90,000 pounds of cotton by the newly freed men and women. Workers were paid $1 for every 400 pounds harvested. This was the first time newly freed slaves earned wages for their hard work. Frederick Law Olmstead was the executive secretary of the US Sanitary Commission. He felt it was necessary for the Union to, “Train or educate them in a few simple, essential, and fundamental social duties of free men in civilized life.” Olmstead was a famous landscape architect who would go on to design Central Park, Niagara Reservation at Niagara Falls, Biltmore Estate, and many other prestigious grounds. The Port Royal Experiment was an essential plan that offered newly freed slaves an education and a chance to work and live independently of white control. The freedmen’s Bureau was established to help former slaves succeed in their new way of life.

At the suggestion of General Sherman, the US Congress confiscated a strip of coastal land from Charleston to Florida. President Abraham Lincoln issued new land distribution policies that saw 40,000 acres of this land divided between freed families. They were allowed to purchase up to 40 acres of land for $1.25 per acre. Excess army mules were redistributed to the new property owners. It is thought that this was the origin of the slogan “40 acres and a mule.” White northerners were also allowed to buy land, creating tenant farming.

By January of 1862 Union General Thomas W. Sherman requested teachers to instruct the freed men, women, and children. Later that year, the Port Royal Experiment began. This radical program created schools and hospitals for the freedmen. It also allowed them to purchase and run abandoned plantations. 53 missionaries from the New England Freedmen’s Aid Society volunteered during this humanitarian crisis. Skilled teachers, ministers and doctors travelled south to teach life skills and religious studies. Two pivotal initiatives that paved the way for Reconstruction were begun in the Lowcountry – Mitchelville and Penn School.

Laura Towne was dispatched from Pennsylvania with funds to create the Penn School , one of the largest schools created during the experiment. She and fellow educator Ellen Murray established an educational mission on St. Helena Island called Penn School. This was the first school for former slaves of the sea islands. The first classes were held at Oak Plantation, then when enrollment increased, they moved to Brick Church. A school was built adjacent to the church and a complex developed around it which served as a center for the St. Helena Island Gullah community. Along with teaching literacy, the school provided training for midwives, a health care clinic, and the state’s first day care center for black children.

The Penn Center took on a new role during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. In those days there were only a handful of safe havens for black leaders to gather. Civil Rights activists, including Martin Luther King, Jr. spent a significant amount of time on the Penn Center campus. Dr. King and other influential civil rights activists were able to meet and strategize on the beautiful campus. The spot also served as a retreat for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The Penn Center campus was designated a National Historic Monument in 1974. The center is still a vital part of the community. History and culture are preserved in the center’s museum, outreach programs and educational experiences.

The wartime Department of the South was headquartered on Hilton Head Island. Union General Ormsby Mitchel granted Hilton Head freedmen permission to develop the town of Mitchelville in 1862. This was the creation of the first all-black, self-governing community in the country. Government and missionary efforts provided blacks of Mitchelville with education, religion and promoted self-reliance. While learning new skills, the citizens of Mitchelville were able to thrive and continue their Gullah customs and culture. By 1865 Mitchelville had 1,500 inhabitants. They built the First African Baptist Church. Homes were built on quarter-acre lots, where the new inhabitants could grow produce in their own gardens. General Mitchel died from yellow fever, just six weeks after arriving in Mitchelville.

Mitchelville became a fully functioning town, complete with a mayor, councilmen, a treasurer, and other officers who oversaw every aspect of the town. The town boasted three churches, two schools, a store, cotton gin and grist mill. Mitchelville also passed the first compulsory education law in the state, requiring all children between 6 and 15 to be educated in school. The town stretched over 200 acres along the shore of the Atlantic. The major source of employment was the US Army Headquarters. After the war, jobs disappeared with the withdrawal of the US Army. This sent freedmen away from Mitchelville in pursuit of employment. The property that Mitchelville occupied was returned to the previous owners during the Johnson administration. They chose to sell the land to anyone that was interested in purchasing, including former Mitchelville citizens. Most of the land was bought by Freedman March Gardner. The land was later divided amongst heirs and the town no longer appeared on maps by the early 20 th century. Most of the land was eventually sold to the Hilton Head Company and placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1988. The site is preserved as the Historic Mitchelville Freedom Park. The park serves as a Reconstruction Era heritage site. The park features exhibits, signature events and guided tours.

The death of Abraham Lincoln on April 15,1865 ended the momentum for the Port Royal Experiment. President Andrew Johnson worked to restore all lands to their previous owners. Many freedmen that bought land witnessed it returned to its former owners. Sharecropping quickly began to creep onto the scene. Not all black landowners lost their land. Many were able to retain ownership of their purchased properties because they were not reclaimed by the previous owners. By 1868, the Freedmen’s Bureau was completely dismantled. Momentum for the Port Royal Experiment began to diminish with the new administration. The Reconstruction Era ended in 1877. Although it was a brief period in American history, it marked a significant chapter in the history of civil rights in the United States.

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Spanish moss drapes the live oak trees that are ubiquitous to the Edisto Island area. Did you know that Edisto gets its name from the native Edistow people? The Edistow Native Americans were a sub tribe of the Cusabo indians, a group of Native Americans who lived along the Atlantic coast in South Carolina.⏰ Best time of the day to visit: Stop by mid-morning. That way you can explore the island, grab lunch, and stay for the amazing sunset if you choose.🏖️ Things to do while there: Edisto Environmental Learning Center, Boneyard Beach, Scott Creek Inlet, Big Bay Creek, SeaCow Eatery.☀️ Things to visit in the area: Jungle Road Park, Bay Creek Park, Otter Islands, Spanish Mount Point.📆 Best time of the year to visit: For warmer weather come anywhere from March-August.🏨 Where to stay: Fripp Island Golf & Beach Resort (frippislandrsrt), Seabrook Island Club (seabrook_sc), The Sanctuary at Kiawah Island Golf Resort (kiawahresort), Charleston Kiawah Island/Andell Inn (andellinn).Photo by qcphotographer

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The Port Royal Experiment – Setting the Stage for Reconstruction, Part One

by Ashley Webb

Posted on May 29, 2015

In late October of 1861, the Union Naval fleet set sail for Port Royal, South Carolina, hoping to advance Winfield Scott’s plan to blockade the Confederate ports and prevent trade with European countries. Similar to the Chesapeake Bay, Port Royal was a strategic supply route into South Carolina and Georgia, as well as one of the wealthiest Confederate ports because of its sea-islands cotton. The brief naval battle at Port Royal that took place in November 1861 unsettled the Confederate hold on the islands, and led to a hasty retreat for both the Confederate troops and the plantation owners, abandoning all property and possessions. The question soon became about what to do with the 10,000 slaves left behind. Through the efforts of Edward Pierce, Laura Towne, Charlotte Forten, and other Northern missionaries, the initial model used to reintegrate a large African Americans population into society at Port Royal served as the national example for Reconstruction prior to Lincoln’s death.

Soon after the Union gained control over the Sea Islands, slaves from surrounding plantations flocked to Beaufort and Port Royal, looking for their freedom. Several months prior, General Butler at Fort Monroe in Virginia, declared the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 null and void in the Union, resolving that all “property of traitors is…forfeit,” after three slaves escaped to the fort in the cover of night. [i] This progressive decision set the stage for a larger movement of slaves migrating toward the North throughout the rest of the war.

The U.S. Treasurer assigned Edward Pierce, who had worked with the contraband at Fort Monroe, to “visit this district for the purpose of reporting upon the condition of the negroes who had been abandoned by the white population, and [to] suggest some plan for the organization of their labor and the promotion of their general well-being.” [ii] In his initial report, Pierce surveyed 200 plantations within a 15 island radius, counting between 8,000 and 10,000 abandoned slaves. His task was two-fold: to devise a plan to make the area profitable for the Union, and to manage the transition of African Americans from slavery to freedom.

Photograph taken by Timothy O'Sullivan at Smith's Plantation in the Sea Islands.

[i] Edward Pierce, “The Contrabands of Fort Monroe,” Atlantic Monthly, November 1861.

[ii] Edward Pierce, “The Freedmen at Port Royal,” Atlantic Monthly, September 1863.

Bibliography

Pierce, Edward L. “The Contrabands of Fort Monroe.” Atlantic Monthly , November 1861. http://www.drbronsontours.com/bronsonedwardlpiercecontrabandsnov1861.html

Pierce, Edward L. “ The Freedmen at Port Royal.” Atlantic Monthly, September 1863. http://www.drbronsontours.com/bronsonfreedmenatportroyalpiercesept1863.html

“The Negroes at Port Royal.” New York Daily Tribune , February 19 1862. http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030213/1862-02-19/ed-1/seq-4/

Pierce, Edward L. “Light on the Slavery Question; Negroes in South Carolina: Report of the Government Agent.” New York Daily Tribune , February 19 1862. http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030213/1862-02-19/ed-1/seq-6/

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Emancipation day: the freed people of port royal.

On Emancipation Day—January 1, 1863—sea islanders of the Beaufort District realized what they must do to help defeat the Confederacy and keep their freedom.

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Essential Question

How does the Union occupation of Port Royal highlight the complex issues behind the Civil War?

In this lesson, students learn about the Civil War and the Port Royal Experiment, a military reconstruction effort that demonstrates the possibilities that existed for the full citizenship and participation in society of newly freed African American populations in the Southern states. They will also consider the role the Sacred Song tradition of the Gullah/Geechee people who reside in the area surrounding Port Royal might have had during this moment in history.

The Gullah/Geechee are the unique African American inhabitants of the coastal Lowcountry of South Carolina and the Sea Islands, a 250-mile stretch of barrier islands on the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. Due to the relative geographic isolation of the islands, Gullah/Geechee culture remains a distinct microcosm of African American culture and history. Together with the Gullah/Geechee language and a sweetgrass basket weaving tradition, the culture is defined by its sacred song tradition. The community also shares a unique history, as the Sea Islands were the site of significant military and political developments during the Civil War.

While neither the Confederacy nor the Union declared the Civil War to be a war specifically about slavery, it is clearly the matter that drove the United States to war. The South went to war to preserve slavery. But the North did not go to war to end slavery; rather to preserve the Union. In a letter to Abolitionist Horace Greeley dated August 22 1862, Lincoln wrote, “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.”

The nation’s economic dependence on the institution of slavery and the sheer number of enslaved African Americans living in the Confederate states made the question of whether slavery should persist central to national politics. The winner of a fraught 1860 election in which slavery was the deciding issue, President Lincoln held fast to the opinion that slavery should not be allowed to extend to the Western territories. So unpopular was Lincoln’s position on slavery in the Southern states that his name did not appear on Southern ballots. In December 1860, weeks after Lincoln was elected and before he was inaugurated, South Carolina seceded from the Union in a pre-emptive act to ensure that slavery would continue and could expand.

Once the Civil War began, Radical Republicans in Congress introduced confiscation acts which eroded the slaveholders’ claims to the enslaved people held as chattel. The First Confiscation Act (1861) gave the government the right to seize any enslaved person used for “insurrectionary purposes.” The Second Confiscation Act, passed in July 1862, extended the federal government’s authority over the property of secessionists convicted of treason. The provisions extended to freedpeople included the promise of transport and resettlement in “some tropical nation” that would accept those willing to emigrate. Further, the act prohibited the return of anyone formerly enslaved to bondage and allowed for freedmen to serve in the Union forces.

In November 1861, six months after the Civil War began, the Union Army took Port Royal, South Carolina. The strategically located port served as a base for patrol ships that prevented the Confederacy from exporting cotton and importing weapons. When the Union fleet arrived at the harbor, the plantation owners and civilians of the port city of Beaufort fled, leaving Confederate soldiers behind to defend the territory against the Union warships. The Confederate Army was quickly overwhelmed as they were outnumbered 5 to 1.

The Union Army occupied the city of Beaufort, freed approximately 10,000 enslaved Black people in the region by military decree and took control of the lucrative cotton trade that drove the local economy. The Union Army and Northerners filled the void left by their counterparts in the Southern ruling class, overseeing and profiting from the harvest and processing of that year’s cotton. Formerly enslaved laborers were hired and sheltered by the Union Army and received $1 for every 400 pounds of cotton harvested, becoming the first community of freedpeople to be paid for the same labor they had once done without compensation.

In January 1861, Union General Sherman requested teachers from the North to train formerly enslaved people. The resulting effort, known as the Port Royal Experiment, aimed to provide newly freed African Americans of the Beaufort area with schools and hospitals, and acted as a precursor to the period of Reconstruction after the Civil War.

Upon completion of this lesson, students will:

About the Gullah/Geechee people of the Sea Islands and their unique culture
The cause and progression of the Civil War
About the Port Royal Experiment
Abraham Lincoln’s Cooper Union Address
The intents and effects of the First and Second Confiscation Acts and the Emancipation Proclamation
The work of African American and educator Charlotte Forten
Students will develop an understanding of slavery as the key factor of the Civil War by examining primary source documents and listening to the music traditions of the Gullah/Geechee people.

Johns Island Wesley United Methodist Church

“getting late in the evening”, image 1, map of secession, 1860-1861, image 2, map of secession, 1863, image 3, writing prompt, motivational activity:.

Tell students that they will be assuming the role of ethnographers–social scientists who study people in their own environments. They will be watching a video of a musical performance, and as ethnographers, should practice a type of detailed description that anthropologist Clifford Geertz called “thick description.” They should observe the subject’s behavior, but also the context behind that behavior (the surrounding environment, the subject’s personal background, etc.).
What general observations did you have while watching the video?
Where does it seem like the video was shot?
What were the instruments you saw being played? How were the performers making music?
How would you describe the singing?
Who were the active participants? How could you tell?
How would you describe the demeanor of the musicians? Do they seem serious, playful, reverent?
How would you describe the way the people in the video are dressed?
What adjectives would you use to describe the style of the music?
How does the song begin and how does it end? Does the feeling or intensity change at any point?
What might be the function of this music?
How old might this song be?
In what region of the United States might this video have been filmed?
Tell students that the song they saw performed, “Getting Late in the Evening,” is sung in a style that dates back to the days when African Americans were enslaved. This community singing the song, known as the Gullah/Geechee people, live in the Sea Islands on the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, and were one of the first communities of African Americans freed during the Civil War.
Pass out to students Handout 1 – Introducing Terms , and work through the definitions together as a class.
Pass out Handout 2- Primary Source Documents on the Civil War. Tell students that they will be working through portions of this document throughout the class to better understand the role the issue of slavery played in the Civil War.
What is the historical context of this speech? What was the purpose?
Who is Lincoln speaking to in this portion of the speech?
Who might Lincoln be referring to when he uses the word “we” in the third paragraph?
According to Lincoln, what claim are Southerners making? Why does he argue that such a claim is unjustified?
Earlier in the speech, Lincoln asserts that by opposing slavery, he and his fellow Republicans are not radically reinterpreting the laws of the country, but rather enforcing the founding ideals of the United States. How does he defend this idea in this portion of the speech?
What are Lincoln’s thoughts towards slavery, according to this speech?
What is the purpose of this document?
What might the quote from the Constitution at the beginning of the excerpt be referring to? Who might be a “person held to service or labor”? According to the Constitution, what should be done with such people if they escape to other states?
In the second paragraph, the document claims that without this stipulation in the Constitution, the Southern and Northern states would have never joined to become the United States of America. Why is this stipulation in the interests of the Southern States especially?
What does the letter accuse the non-Slaveholding States of doing in the third paragraph?
According to the fourth paragraph, what caused a “line” to be “drawn” across the Northern and Southern states? Which president is the document referring to?
In the fifth paragraph, who are the authors of this document referring to in the phrase “this party”?

What does this map represent? What is the date range of the map?
As you read in the previous document, South Carolina was the first State to secede, on December 24, 1860. What does this map hint happened following this initial secession?
What do the purple and pink areas on the map represent? What do the orange and yellow areas represent? What about the brown areas? (Note to teacher: to help students answer this question, you may have to zoom in on the key at the bottom of the map.)

How many years into the Civil War does this map represent?
The orange parts of the map represent areas the Southern Confederate states still controlled, while the yellow portions of the map represent where the Confederate forces ceded control to the Union (Northern) Army. Based on this representation, what might you say about the state of the Civil War in 1863?
Do you notice anything geographically similar about the areas in the South that the Union army gained control over? What do they have in common?
Why might it be important for the Union Army to gain control of areas by water?
What might the red ship illustrations around the coastline represent?
What is this illustration showing?
What might the snake represent?
Examine the scenes the illustrator provides in each state. How do the illustrations in the Southern states differ from the illustrations of the Northern states? Which area seems to be depicted as being more prosperous?
Who might “Scott” be? Why might the snake be his?
The illustration refers to Union General Winfield Scott’s “Anaconda Plan” to create blockades to isolate the South from trade, crushing it economically. Why might gaining control of the eastern seaboard and Mississippi River be essential to this plan?
What might have happened to enslaved people who lived and worked in Union-occupied areas in the south?
Divide the class into 3 groups, and assign each group either Document 4: The First Confiscation Act , Document 5: The Second Confiscation Act , or Document 6: The Emancipation Proclamation . Ask each group read over the documents, and be prepared to present a brief (1-2 sentence) summary of their assigned document before the class.
Compare the worksheets. Which group’s document seemed to grant the greatest access to resources? Which document would you guess made the least impact on the lives of freedpeople?
What can we say about the distance between the law and the lived experience of people whose rights the law protects?
Name one resource that your legislation could not secure.
Which of the criteria listed on the worksheet are we able to think about in terms of the social and political discourse in the U.S. today? (Note to teacher: answers will vary but if students do not see the connections immediately, offer water security [Flint, Newark] or ability to live in families [marriage equality] or physical safety [school shootings or other gun violence.])
What is the reason that Lincoln enters the war as stated in this letter?
How do the contents of this letter change the way you read the Emancipation Proclamation?
Who or what is Lincoln’s primary concern as he decides the course of the nation? Does he feel the nation can exist with slavery?
What might have life been like for a ex-slave living in Port Royal? What might have been the benefits? What might have been the drawbacks?
How might have life been different for ex-slaves here, after being freed? How might have life still been difficult?
Looking back at Handout 2, what basic rights might have been given to residents of Port Royal? Which might have still been denied or unattained?

Summary Activity:

Have all students turn to Document 8 in Handout 1, “Account of Sea Island Music by Charlotte Forten.” Ask students to read the document to themselves.
What similarities did you notice between the video clip and Forten’s 1864 account?
In what ways might have this music changed in the over 100 year time differences between the video and the written account? How has it stayed the same?

Show Image 3, Writing Prompt, and have students follow the prompt given, either on paper, or as a class discussion.

Extension Activity:

Identify two or three significant differences between the clergy’s response to the question of freedom for enslaved African Americans and the opinions of government and military officials found in Handout 1. In your opinion, what accounts for their differing perspectives? Consider the ways in which these differences would inform the creation and maintenance of a representative democracy. Write about the challenges that face the federal government in addressing the interests of all of the speakers in this article.

Explore Further:

Craft, William and Ellen, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (University of Georgia Press)
Forten, Charlotte “Life on the Sea Islands” Atlantic Monthly https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/02/life-on-the-sea-islands/308818/
“The Civil War: Promise of Reconstruction”: The Port Royal Experiment (PBS)
U.S. National Archives: Civil War https://www.archives.gov/research/military/civil-war
U.S. Library of Congress: Civil War Photographs, Freedmen http://www.loc.gov/pictures/search/?q=Freedmen&co=civwar
Reading Guide for The 1619 Project Essays https://pulitzercenter.org/sites/default/files/reading_guide_for_the_1619_project_essays.pdf
PDF of full issue here
Wade in the Water Volume II: African American Congregational Singing: Nineteenth- Century Roots (Smithsonian Folkways)

Gallery Walk Activity Handout 1 – Introducing Terms Handout 2- Primary Source Documents Handout 3 – “Life, Liberty, and Happiness” Worksheet

Common Core State Standards

College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for Reading

Reading 1: Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.

Reading 2: Determine central ideas or themes of a text and analyze their development; summarize the key supporting details and ideas.

Reading 3: Analyze how and why individuals, events, or ideas develop and interact over the course of a text.

Craft and Structure 4: Interpret words and phrases as they are used in a text, including determining technical, connotative, and figurative meanings, and analyze how specific word choices shape meaning or tone.

Craft and Structure 5: Analyze the structure of texts, including how specific sentences, paragraphs, and larger portions of the text (e.g., a section, chapter, scene, or stanza) relate to each other and the whole.

Craft and Structure 6: Assess how point of view or purpose shapes the content and style of a text.

Integration of Knowledge and Ideas 7: Integrate and evaluate content presented in diverse media and formats, including visually and quantitatively, as well as in words.

Integration of Knowledge and Ideas 8: Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, including the validity of the reasoning as well as the relevance and sufficiency of the evidence.

Integration of Knowledge and Ideas 9: Analyze how two or more texts address similar themes or topics in order to build knowledge or to compare the approaches the authors take.

Range of Reading and Level of Text Complexity 10: Read and comprehend complex literary and informational texts independently and proficiently.

College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for Writing

Text Types and Purposes 1: Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence.

Text Types and Purposes 2: Write informative/explanatory texts to examine and convey complex ideas and information clearly and accurately through the effective selection, organization, and analysis of content.

Text Types and Purposes 3: Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, well-chosen details and well-structured event sequences.

College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for Language

Language 3: Apply knowledge of language to understand how language functions in different contexts, to make effective choices for meaning or style, and to comprehend more fully when reading or listing.

Vocabulary Acquisition and Use 4: Determine or clarify the meaning of unknown and multiple-meaning words and phrases by using context clues, analyzing meaningful word parts, and consulting general and specialized reference materials, as appropriate.

Vocabulary Acquisition and Use 5: Demonstrate understanding of figurative language, word relationships, and nuances in a word meaning.

Vocabulary Acquisition and Use 6: Acquire and use accurately a range of general academic and domain-specific words and phrases sufficient for reading, writing, speaking, and listening at the college and career readiness level; demonstrate independence in gathering vocabulary knowledge when encountering an unknown term important to comprehension or expression.

College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for Speaking and Listening

Comprehension & Collaboration 1: Prepare for and participate effectively in a range of conversations and collaborations with diverse partners, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively.

Comprehension & Collaboration 2: Integrate and evaluate information presented in diverse media and formats, including visually, quantitatively, and orally.

Comprehension & Collaboration 3: Evaluate a speaker’s point of view, reasoning, and use of evidence and rhetoric.

Presentation of Knowledge 4: Present information, findings, and supporting evidence such that listeners can follow the line of reasoning and the organization, development, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.

Career Technical Education Standards (California Model) – Arts, Media and Entertainment Pathway Standards

Design, Visual and Media Arts (A)

A1.0 Demonstrate ability to reorganize and integrate visual art elements across digital media and design applications. A1.9 Analyze the material used by a given artist and describe how its use influences the meaning of the work. ia, and Entertainment | A3.0 Analyze and assess the impact of history and culture on the development of professional arts and media products. A3.2 Describe how the issues of time, place, and cultural influence and are reflected in a variety of artistic products. A3.3 Identify contemporary styles and discuss the diverse social, economic, and political developments reflected in art work in an industry setting. A4.0 Analyze, assess, and identify effectiveness of artistic products based on elements of art, the principles of design, and professional industry standards. A4.2 Deconstruct how beliefs, cultural traditions, and current social, economic, and political contexts influence commercial media (traditional and electronic). A4.3 Analyze the aesthetic value of a specific commercial work of art and defend that analysis from an industry perspective. A4.5 Analyze and articulate how society influences the interpretation and effectiveness of an artistic product. A5.0 Identify essential industry competencies, explore commercial applications and develop a career specific personal plan. A5.3 Deconstruct works of art, identifying psychological content found in the symbols and images and their relationship to industry and society.

Performing Arts (B)

B2.0 Read, listen to, deconstruct, and analyze peer and professional music using the elements and terminology of music. B2.2 Describe how the elements of music are used. B2.5 Analyze and describe significant musical events perceived and remembered in a given industry generated example. B2.6 Analyze and describe the use of musical elements in a given professional work that makes it unique, interesting, and expressive. B2.7 Demonstrate the different uses of form, both past and present, in a varied repertoire of music in commercial settings from diverse genres, styles, and professional applications. B7.0 Analyze the historical and cultural perspective of multiple industry performance products from a discipline-specific perspective. B7.3 Analyze the historical and cultural perspective of the musician in the professional setting. B8.0 Deconstruct the aesthetic values that drive professional performance and the artistic elements necessary for industry production. B8.1 Critique discipline-specific professional works using the language and terminology specific to the discipline. B8.2 Use selected criteria to compare, contrast, and assess various professional performance forms. B8.3 Analyze the aesthetic principles that apply in a professional work designed for live performance, film, video, or live broadcast. B8.4 Use complex evaluation criteria and terminology to compare and contrast a variety of genres of professional performance products.

National Curriculum Standards for Social Studies – National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS)

Theme 1 : Culture
Theme 2 : Time, Continuity, and Change
Theme 3: People, Place, and Environments
Theme 5: Individuals, Groups, and Institutions
Theme 6: Power, Authority, and Governance
Theme 7: Production, Distributions, and Consumption
Theme 10 : Civic Ideals and Practices

National Standards for Music Education – National Association for Music Education (NAfME)

Core Music Standard: Responding

Analyze : Analyze how the structure and context of varied musical works inform the response.
Interpret : Support interpretations of musical works that reflect creators’ and/or performers’ expressive intent.
Evaluate : Support evaluations of musical works and performances based on analysis, interpretation, and established criteria.

Core Music Standard: Connecting

Connecting 10: Synthesize and relate knowledge and personal experiences to make music.
Connecting 11 : Relate musical ideas and works to varied contexts and daily life to deepen understanding.

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The "Sea Island Experiment" Refers To

Question 65

The "Sea Island Experiment" refers to:

A) northern reformers' efforts to assist former slaves with the transition to freedom. B) the Confederacy's trial use of slaves as soldiers along the South Carolina coast. C) a U.S.government plan to introduce advanced technology to southern farming in order to decrease the need for slaves. D) the unsuccessful effort of General Ulysses Grant to allow former slaves to run their own farms in Mississippi. E) the code name for the Confederate navy's submarine-building program.

Correct Answer:

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40 Acres and a Mule: Role-Playing What Reconstruction Could Have Been

Teaching Activity. By Adam Sanchez. Rethinking Schools, 2020. This multimedia, creative role play introduces students to the ways African American life changed immediately after the Civil War by focusing on the Sea Islands before and during Reconstruction.

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By Adam Sanchez

Keith Henry Brown

There are moments in history that give us a glimpse of a different world — moments that force us to wonder if things could have turned out differently. One of those moments occurred at the end of the Civil War in 1865 on what are known as the Sea Islands of the Georgia and South Carolina coast. Freedmen and women divided up land, planted crops, started schools, and created a new society in the ashes of the old.

Many historians term this experiment in grassroots democracy and Black self-determination that occurred in the coastal Sea Islands a “rehearsal” for Reconstruction. But the Sea Islands experiment was more than a rehearsal; subsequent Reconstruction plans lacked the key ingredient that made it revolutionary: the redistribution of land.

For a brief moment in U.S. history, the property of some of the wealthiest people was handed over to some of the poorest. The story of what happened to the land illuminates so much of what was possible and what went wrong during the Reconstruction era and helps us better understand how racism and inequality still shape the United States today.

As a high school history teacher, I wanted to design a lesson that would both introduce students to the ways African American life changed after the Civil War and take them through the dramatic story of the Sea Islands. I created a multiday role play that utilized creative writing, map-making, and film clips to introduce students to this crucial chapter of early Reconstruction history that set the stage for the battles to come.

Role-Playing Freed Families

Social studies teacher Mark Cichon invited me into his Hillcrest High School classroom in Queens to teach this lesson to his 12th-grade government class. Mark’s class resembled the overall school demographics: almost entirely students of color and evenly split between Black, Latina/o, and Asian students. More than 80 percent of the students at Hillcrest receive free or reduced lunch.

After a quick review of the Civil War, we jumped into the role play. I asked Mark to group students into six “families” that would stay together throughout the weeklong lesson. Then I started explaining to the class that to learn about the Reconstruction era, we would start in Georgia immediately following the Civil War.

“Something remarkable happened there,” I told them.

After explaining to students that they were grouped into “families,” I passed out a role sheet that would set the stage for the lessons to come:

In the final months of the Civil War, Union Army General William Tecumseh Sherman had a problem. He had marched 60,000 Union soldiers 285 miles from Atlanta to Savannah, Georgia, striking fear into the Confederacy and landing a decisive blow for the Union. But along the march thousands of newly freed people began following Sherman’s army. Finding housing, employment, food, clothes, and medicine for the refugees soon became impossible. Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton decided to hold a meeting with a delegation of Savannah’s Black leaders to get their advice on what to do with the 10,000 formerly enslaved people now marching with Sherman’s army. Garrison Frazier, a Baptist minister and the group’s spokesman, made clear the demands of the freedmen and women: “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land.” Four days later, Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15. The order redistributed 400,000 abandoned acres of land, in 40-acre plots, to newly freed Black families. Later Sherman agreed to lend Black settlers army mules to work the land. This gave birth to the famous phrase “40 acres and a mule,” as a small reparation for years held in slavery.

Before the war, you lived with your family on the Sea Islands of Georgia. You were enslaved and worked on the coastal plantations for some of the richest slave owners. . . . While you worked in the hot sun, your “owners” usually retreated to better weather in Savannah, Charleston, or New York. Under slavery, you were forced to work, farming rice and cotton. Those crops were sold and the profits made your “owner” one of the wealthiest people in the country. They lived in luxury, while you barely survived. Even when your “owners” left the plantation, they hired overseers to make sure you continued to work. If you didn’t do as you were told or tried to escape, you were subject to severe beatings, whippings, and possibly even death.

But when the Union Army came to the Georgia coast, your “owner” again left the plantation — this time, you hope, for good. You are now free. Your freedom means that you can leave the plantation, but Sherman’s Field Order means that you can stay, claim 40 acres of land for your family, and start a new life.

When we finished reading, I distributed instructions for the first activity. My goal was to have students grapple with both the legacy of slavery in defining Black family life in the postwar South, as well as the important changes freedom brought. I gave each group of students a different surname from one of the wealthy slave owners who had ruled the Sea Islands before the Civil War and created four short scenarios to draw out some of the key aspects of postwar life for formerly enslaved African Americans. As a group, students discussed each scenario and decided which individual roles each student would play in the family. After discussing all four, they wrote individual interior monologues or diary entries about one of the scenarios.

Teaching a People's History of Abolition and the Civil War (Book) | Zinn Education Project

Purchase Adam Sanchez’s new book, Teaching A People’s History of Abolition and the Civil War from Rethinking Schools.

In the first scenario, I had students look at advertisements that were placed in the personal or information-wanted sections of Black newspapers across the South in hopes of locating family members who had been sold as a result of slavery. I changed the surnames in the ad to reflect the family names the students had been given. In each group, I asked students to “determine whether your family placed that ad looking for lost family members or whether a lost family member placed the ad looking for you. Once you have decided who is looking for whom, decide whether you were reunited with those family members or not.”

Angela wrote about the joy of being reunited with her children, “I am so happy that we found Nancy, Ben, and Tempa. . . . It felt like my soul was being torn apart when we were all separated. Thank you, God, for returning my three children to me. It’s hard to explain the joy I feel now that we are back together.”

The second scenario involved a family heirloom. Borrowing a strategy another Rethinking Schools editor learned from Toronto teachers at a conference on teaching apartheid in South Africa, I carefully gathered real objects for the lesson because I wanted students to be able to physically connect with something, but printing out images of objects could have also worked. I passed out one object to each group: a blanket, a necklace, a photograph of a Black soldier, a map of the Georgia and South Carolina coast, a wooden cup-and-ball toy, and a leather journal. Each one “is an object that your family would never part with,” the instructions explained. “Invent a backstory to this object that helps us understand your family and why this object is so important to all of you.”

The stories students came up with revealed both the horribly repressive nature of slavery and the various ways enslaved people resisted. As Ankur wrote, “This toy has been in my family for generations . . . it’s one of the things that helps me escape my traumatic past. Knowing that this toy has been passed from child to child, it helps me feel connected to my siblings, some of whom were sold off before the war.” Corina wrote that for her family, the map they received “represented our freedom as it pinpoints the location we would meet if we managed to escape slavery together.”

Ellen's Broom (Book) | Zinn Education Project

Ellen’s Broom is a fictionalized account of marriage and tradition during Reconstruction.

The third scenario asks students to imagine they either took part in or witnessed one of the mass wedding ceremonies that occurred in the aftermath of the Civil War. As Allie explained in her diary entry, unlike under slavery, an official marriage license meant that husbands and wives could “now claim each other, their children, and their property,” all of which enslaved people had no legal claim to. “For these reasons” as the handout explains, “many newly freed couples were eager to obtain an official marriage license and hold a public ceremony to celebrate unions that had received only partial recognition under slavery . . . mass wedding ceremonies involving as many as 70 couples at a time became a common sight in the postwar South.”

And finally, I asked students to decide whether or not to change their family’s surname. As the handout explains, “During the war, many Black soldiers began using new last names as a way of asserting their new freedom. Others chose to maintain their old surnames as a tie to their birthplace and ancestors or to make it easier for lost family members to find them. Now it’s time for your family to decide.”

“We’ve come a long way. Our family has been enslaved for generations, but now that we are free, everything is different,” Patrisse wrote about her group’s decision. “One thing, however, still doesn’t feel right. It’s our surname. For so long we’ve been addressed by the name of our brutal slave owner. However, now that we are free, we are changing our name. . . . This new name will finally free our family from our horrible past.”

After giving students a chance to write about their stories, they read their writing to the other members of their group. Each group picked one piece of writing to share with the larger class and gave all of us a sense of the family backstory they had discussed together.

It took one 45-minute class period for students to discuss each scenario, and another 45-minute class period to write and share their stories. By the end of the two days, students seemed proud of the stories they created. But to capture the story of freedpeople in the Sea Islands, I wanted them to also experience — as much as one can in a classroom — what it must have felt like to build a new society out of the ashes of the old.

Mapping Out 40 Acres and Building a Community

For the next activity, I used an online map creation tool from RollForFantasy.com to make maps where students could plot out their family’s 40 acres. I also created a handout that provides some basic information about how land passed into the hands of freed families:

General Rufus Saxton, currently in control of the Georgia and South Carolina Sea Islands, has demanded General Sherman’s order be enforced and has named Tunis Campbell, a Black Northern abolitionist, as superintendent to help settle freedmen and women on St. Catherine’s Island on the Georgia coast. Campbell has split up the island into 40-acre plots for each family. . . . Campbell has been in touch with Northern missionaries and abolitionists who have created freedmen’s aid societies. These organizations have donated clothing, seeds, plows, and hoes. Your family must decide what your priorities are for your land: What do you want to grow? Many people are watching this experiment in the Sea Islands, so it’s important that you, your family, and your community prove that you can make it on your own.

To reinforce this information and give students a visual of the Sea Islands, I played a short clip from PBS’s Reconstruction: The Second Civil War (Part 1, Scene 5, 23:02–25:42). During the clip, historian Eric Foner explains, “There were a lot of people in 1865 who were trying to tell Blacks what freedom is and tell them what they ought to be doing. [Tunis] Campbell reflects the impulse ‘We should really determine ourselves what we’re doing.’ Independence from white control — that’s critical to their definition of what freedom is.”

After the clip we returned to the handout and went through the instructions for creating a map of their family’s 40-acre plots. The instructions take students step-by-step through the process of creating their map. Students determine what acres on their map are tillable, decide where they would like to build their family’s new home, and debate whether they want to produce cotton to sell or food to grow for subsistence. Finally, following simple guidelines, students indicate with colored pencils where each crop is grown on their map.

A sketch by Jas. E. Taylor of farmer plowing in South Carolina, 1866. Image: Library of Congress.

The main learning that occurs during this map activity comes in the decision about whether or not to grow cotton. The handout emphasizes that “Many in the North . . . want you to produce cotton to sell up North. Northern industries depend on a supply of cheap cotton from the South and they want you to continue selling to them.” But like the newly freed people on the Sea Islands, most students are reluctant to grow a crop they can’t eat and is associated with slavery. The idea of building a community that can sustain itself by growing its own food is attractive.

When students finished coloring their map, I had each group roll a die to determine how well their first crop did. As the handout explains, their die roll determines whether their family ends the growing season in debt, breaking even, or with a profit. If students choose to grow cotton, there is a higher risk their family won’t break even, but also higher possible profits. At Hillcrest, every group chose to grow food, not wanting to be dependent on white cotton dealers and the ups and downs of the market. With several high rolls, only one group ended up in debt, with almost all groups having a profit at the end of the day.

The next day, I sat students in a circle and went from family to family asking each to remind me how much money they made the day before. This is important because the questions we were about to debate ask students to sacrifice some of this money for the greater good.

I then played another short clip from Reconstruction: The Second Civil War that shows the community on the Georgia Sea Islands thriving. After quoting a letter from Campbell that discusses the various crops planted, the narrator describes the government the community created: “There would be a Congress with eight men in the Senate and 20 in the House of Representatives. A Supreme Court, and Campbell himself as president” (Part 1, Scene 5, 25:42–26:50). I stop the clip immediately after the sentence above, before the narrator mentions the militia.

Next, I told students that for this lesson I would play the role of Tunis Campbell, who has convened a “community meeting” with all the families on the island. I then gave a handout to each student outlining the two key questions we would discuss: Do you want to devote time and money to building and maintaining a school? Do you want to devote time and money to forming a militia? Each question is introduced with some background. For example, question two begins:

Jacob Waldburg, the prewar owner of St. Catherine’s Island, is back in town and demanding that his land be restored to him. . . . In addition, the community on St. Catherine’s Island has increasingly become a symbol of Black freedom and self-determination. Many of you are worried that the community might become a target for whites on the mainland. . . . Campbell suggests that the community pass a law to keep white people off of the island and set up an armed militia to enforce the law.

Because almost every group had money to spare after the previous day’s die rolls, spending some of it to set up a school and a militia seemed like a no-brainer. Nevertheless, a few students still questioned both ideas. Brandon argued, “We made a ton of money yesterday. We’re already doing so well. Why do we need schools?” But Sequanna replied, “How do you know we’ll always be doing well? What happens when we’re in debt and we can’t read or write? We could easily get taken advantage of.” Lori added, “And there was a reason white people didn’t want us to read in the first place. They wanted to keep us in a lower position.”

After students made a decision to fund the school, I played another short video clip from Reconstruction (Part 1, Scene 8, 38:49-43:05) that details the tremendous efforts freedpeople made on the island to gain an education and sets up the second question by discussing the return of Waldburg demanding his land.

The next debate was more controversial. Although most agreed a militia should be formed for protection, especially from Waldburg, banning all white people from the island did not sit well with several students. Ali argued, “You can’t fight racism with racism and that’s what we’re doing if we ban all white people.” Brandon added, “Also we could sell white people our crops. Why do we want to ban them?” Nathan disagreed, “Most white people were racists, they’re not coming on to our island to buy food from us. They’re coming to mess up the community we created.”

Students decided against the law. I explained that in reality, the Sea Islands government did indeed ban white people from the island and enforced that law through their militia. As the bell was about to ring, we briefly discussed why people on the Sea Islands might have passed this law in contradiction to what our class decided.

Responding to Presidential Reconstruction

Listening to their passionate discussions, it was clear that students had become deeply invested in the community they had created. So while learning what happened next was tough on students emotionally, I felt like it was important to give them a small taste of what it might have felt like for the people of the Sea Islands to lose their land.

When students returned to class the following day, I informed them that something terrible had happened: “The president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, has been shot. The vice president, Andrew Johnson, is being sworn in as the new president.” I then turned to another clip from Reconstruction (Part 1, Scene 9, 47:00–51:38) that discusses the ascension of Andrew Johnson and his policy of pardoning thousands of former Confederate plantation owners. In the clip, historian Russell Duncan explains, “The planters only want to be pardoned so that they could get their land back. And so Andrew Johnson complies with their wishes, pardoning 15,000 to 20,000 planters, hundreds of them being pardoned every day. When these planters then are pardoned, they return to their islands and to their acreages all over the South, and they want the people who are then living there removed.”

I end the clip after a scene that reenacts a powerful meeting on Edisto Island in South Carolina. General O. O. Howard, the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, established by Congress in 1865 to help formerly enslaved people, travels to the island to meet with freedpeople who had been living independently in the Sea Islands. He explains to them that they must return their land to its prewar owners. I stop the clip after a quote from a letter sent by representatives of the Edisto Island community: “You ask us to forgive the landowners of our island . . . the man who tied me to a tree and gave me 39 lashes, who stripped and flogged my mother and my sister and will not let me stay in his empty hut, except I will do his planting and be satisfied with his price — that man I cannot well forgive.”

I then explained to students that Johnson’s new policy means that the land and the community that they have been cultivating is also now in jeopardy. I asked them to write their own letters — either to President Johnson or General Howard — about why these lands should not be returned. The letters students wrote were full of anger and anguish. Shaunté wrote, “I must have been a fool to believe that we had some type of freedom in this country. For many years I have suffered, been beaten, and robbed of my education all because of my skin color. Once again, my rights as a human being are being taken from me. This land that I put my blood, sweat, and tears into is going to be given to the people who have done nothing but rob us of everything.”

Josh pointed out the debt that the country owed enslaved people: “We deserve this land! Our family has been tortured by this man. We’ve been beaten and treated like animals. So as a punishment you give them their land back? We refuse to give up this land. It’s the least this country can do for us. We refuse to become someone else’s laborers again. We refuse to work for a white man and live a miserable life. We deserve better!”

After students shared their letters with one another, I presented them with a final decision to debate as a community:

In January of 1866, a battalion of Black U.S. Army soldiers arrive on the island with orders to protect (the prewar owner of the island) Jacob Waldburg’s property rights. Waldburg has rented the plantation to two white Northern capitalists who want the freedmen, women, and children to sign labor contracts with them. These Northern capitalists hope to return all the land to the production of cash crops.

There is a debate in your community about how to respond. Of course, if you chose to create a militia, you could try to fight. But you’d be going up against the U.S. Army — even worse, you’d be fighting other African Americans. Some argue that as hard a pill as it is to swallow, if you want to stay on the land you invested so much time in, the land of your ancestors, you have to sign contracts to work for these Northern capitalists. Others argue that it’s time to leave. When you were enslaved, you couldn’t leave the plantation without your owners’ permission, but now you’re free to leave and find work elsewhere — maybe you could even use the money you’ve saved up to buy land somewhere else.

Company E 4th U.S. Colored Infantry at Fort Lincoln Photo

Company E, 4th U.S. Colored Infantry, at Fort Lincoln, District of Columbia. 1865.

Students argued forcefully against Nathan, a particularly defiant young man who wanted to turn their militia against the Black U.S. Army troops. While it quickly became clear the class would not fight the Army, the decision on whether to stay or leave was not as easy. Many of the family groups had built into their storyline that they hoped to find a relative who had been sold away under slavery. They worried that if they left they might never be able to find that person. Ultimately, the class decided that this was a decision that each family had to make for themselves. Like in real life, some decided to stay and others to leave.

When the class finished debating, I told them the real historical outcome of both groups. Those who decided to stay initially signed contracts for high pay, but at the end of the season the new white Northern owners of the land refused to pay them. Like many freedpeople across the South they engaged in a long battle with new white employers over pay and working conditions. Those who left, led by Tunis Campbell, established another Black cooperative community farther inland in McIntosh County. This county became a center of Black Power during Radical Reconstruction in Georgia and was the base upon which Campbell was elected both justice of the peace and representative to the Georgia State Legislature in 1868.

Lessons from the Sea Islands

When students returned the following day, I had them step out of their roles to write and discuss the role play they had participated in over the course of the week. I asked them:

• What emotions did you have after finding out you would lose your land? How do you think freedmen and women who participated in the Sea Islands community felt when they lost their land? • Why do you think the U.S. government decided to give former plantation owners back their land? • Was Andrew Johnson solely responsible for what happened? Who could have challenged him? • Was there anything freedpeople could have done to keep their land? • Why was land so important to newly freed people? • Is this story simply a tragedy? Is there anything that brings you hope?

The next time I teach this lesson I want to add questions about how this history helps us understand race and racism today. My main regret in implementing the lesson is that most of our discussions remained in the past. I also wish I had spent more time asking students to reflect on their experiences during the role play and what had stuck with them. Nevertheless, students’ answers revealed how well this role play had introduced them to the larger themes of the Reconstruction era.

About the people who had participated in the Sea Islands community, Brandon wrote, “I think they felt betrayed. They worked this land and built a community as a symbol of Black freedom and that was taken away.” Combining his feelings with those he imagined for the Sea Islands community, Josh added, “The government just teased us. They mocked us by giving us land and then taking it away like it was on a fish hook. The freedmen and women probably felt outraged . . . like the government didn’t care about them.”

Students had many opinions about why the government gave back land to former plantation owners. Josh believed it was to “establish that whites have more power.” Paul thought that the government didn’t think formerly enslaved people “deserved the land that white people originally owned.” Gaby, on the other hand, thought it was because the government wanted “to make money off of it and sell cotton to the North.” Angela agreed, writing that “the U.S. government decided to give former plantation owners back their land because they knew those former owners would produce cotton. These people committed treason but were pardoned and given back their land to boost the economy.”

Indeed, what is often missing in the telling of presidential Reconstruction is that Andrew Johnson was not only thinking about restoring white rule in the South, he was also carrying out the wishes of a section of the industrial and financial elite of the North who preferred a return to business as usual. Several Northern businesses profited immensely from the production of cash crops before the war and their owners hoped the end of the war would signal a shift back to cash crop production in the South. Furthermore, if enslaved people could successfully make a case that the wealth of their former owners should be redistributed to them, what was to prevent the workers of the North from making similar demands on the wealth of Northern capitalists? The titans of Northern industry and finance and their representatives in the government decided that the revolution in the South had to have limits and property rights had to be respected. This meant that freedpeople who had been farming the land, growing crops for their own sustenance, had to be dispossessed. The land was given back to the former slave owners or leased to Northern capitalists hoping to make a buck off the new South.

Thaddeus Stevens

Although it’s true that many Republicans and business owners would come to reject Johnson’s Reconstruction plan and embrace Black civil and political rights, few were willing to envision Blacks in the south as landowners rather than workers. When Radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens proposed redistributing the land of former Confederates, his bill couldn’t even get out of committee. It’s hard to imagine how deeply history might have changed if land distribution was expanded from the Sea Islands to the rest of the South, rather than reversed. When Blacks won the right to vote a few years after the Sea Islands experiment, for the first time in history more than 1,500 Black people were elected to local, state, and federal offices throughout the South. Despite the acquisition of tremendous political power, control of the Southern economy remained in the hands of the white elite who were determined to win back the reins of the government — by violence if necessary. The lack of economic power left Blacks vulnerable. Furthermore, taking land redistribution off the table undermined the potential coalition between freedpeople and land-hungry poor whites who were ultimately swayed by the white elites’ appeal to racism.

While the story of the Sea Islands is a profound tragedy, students could also clearly see the promise in this experiment in Black self-determination. Corina felt it was “inspiring to see how newly freed slaves never gave up. Even though they were constantly made to feel less than, they still fought for their rights and their survival.” Allie wrote that the story of the Sea Islands “shows the will and strength people have to gain freedom. . . . The desire to not just survive but thrive together.” Greta summed it up by saying, “This story is not simply a tragedy because it did not end here. People were freed, they established their own land, schools, homes, government. They came a long way even though they had to continue to fight for their rights.” For Angela, the Sea Islands community “was a symbol of Black freedom. . . . It represented hope.”

For teaching materials related to this article, including handouts, maps, and examples, go to bit.ly/40AcresMaterials (opens in Google Drive).

Adam Sanchez teaches at Harvest Collegiate High School, a public school in New York City. He is a Rethinking Schools editor and is also editor of the new book Teaching a People’s History of Abolition and the Civil War .

Illustrator Keith Henry Brown’s work can be found at keithhenrybrown.com .

Learn more in the Zinn Education Project national report, “ Erasing the Black Freedom Struggle: How State Standards Fail to Teach the Truth About Reconstruction, ” and find teaching resources on Reconstruction below.

Related Resources

Reconstructing the South: A Role Play

Lesson. By Bill Bigelow. 17 pages. This role play engages students in thinking about what freedpeople needed in order to achieve — and sustain — real freedom following the Civil War. It’s followed by a chapter from the book Freedom’s Unfinished Revolution .

Frances Harper, William Sylvis, Isaac Myers, and John Roy Lynch pictured. They were leaders of the Reconstruction Era in US history

When the Impossible Suddenly Became Possible: A Reconstruction Mixer

Teaching Activity. By Adam Sanchez and Nqobile Mthethwa. 25 pages. A mixer role play explores the connections between different social movements during Reconstruction.

Teaching a People’s History of Abolition and the Civil War

Teaching Guide. Edited by Adam Sanchez. 2019. Rethinking Schools. 181 pages. Students will discover the real abolition story, one about some of the most significant grassroots social movements in U.S. history.

Forty Acres and Maybe a Mule

Book — Fiction. By Harriette Gillem Robinet. 1998. 144 pages. Historical fiction featuring 12-year-old Pascal, 8-year-old Nellie, and their older brother Gideon, a Union Army aide, as they claim and farm the land promised to them during Reconstruction.

Black Power USA Book Cover | Zinn Education Project

Black Power U.S.A.: The Human Side of Reconstruction, 1867-1877

Book — Non-fiction. By Lerone Bennett Jr. 1967. 426 pages. A bottom-up, student friendly text about the people’s history of Reconstruction.

How to — and How Not to — Teach Role Plays

Considerations regarding the planning and use of role plays for teaching people’s history.

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History of the Sea Island experiment?

This is just a quick summary I wrote for a paper:

November 1861, the Union navy occupied the Sea Islands. Nearly the entire white population fled, leaving behind 10,000 slaves. Many northerners including; army officers, treasury agents, investors, and a group known as Gideon's Band, came to settle the islands. Each group had its own ideas over how the freedom process should be organized. Journalists reported every development on the islands to an eager reading public in the North. Some believed the free slaves needed education while others believed the best way was to allow then to work for wages. By 1865, the Sea Island experiment was a huge success with black families working for wages, getting an education, and enjoying better shelter and clothing.

The Sea Island Experiment refers to the flight of the Union navy in the Sea Islands. This was in 1861 where 10,000 slaves were left behind.

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What were the two charter colonies?

Connecticut and Rhode Island -just thought ide say this helps in History class =D

Which colony was founded as a result of religious dissent in the New World?

New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Connecticut were all founded because of religious intolerance.

When did jamica become a state?

Jamaica is not a state, it's an island nation located in the Caribbean Sea.

What was the worst nuclear power plant accident in US history?

Three Mile Island, Pa, 1979

What are the answers to the history buff's crosswords plus American government and economics?

a brother of Zeus and god of the sea

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Martha Johnson Sea Island papers

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Photocopies of letters written by Martha Johnson (1822-1871), a Vermont native who volunteered to teach contraband slaves abandoned by their owners after Federal forces occupied the Port Royal / Beaufort, South Carolina area. The file includes 13 photocopied letters, a short handwritten biography of Martha, a typewritten historical overview and transcription of the letters by Betty Wilkinson, a biographical key to the people mentioned in the letters, and photocopies of certificates and reports from the National Freedman's Relief Association and the American Missionary Association.

Creation: 1863 - 1872
Johnson, Martha (Person)

Conditions Governing Access

This collection is available by appointment only. Please contact the Kennedy Room for more information.

Biographical / Historical

Martha Johnson (1822-1871) was a teacher from Peacham, VT. Johnson worked as a matron in a workhouse on Blackwell Island, NY and a teacher at an industrial school in New York City. In 1863, she was hired by the newly formed National Freedman’s Relief Association to teach the newly freed slaves living on the Sea Islands in the low country of South Carolina. Johnson stayed there until her death in 1871 and she was buried in the Episcopal Church cemetery in Beaufort, South Carolina. In 1861, Union forces liberated the Sea Islands, located off the coast of South Carolina as part of their naval strategy during the war. The white plantation owners fled the islands, leaving behind around 10,000 slaves. The slaves were declared “contraband of war” and placed under the jurisdiction of the US Department of the Treasury. The Treasury Department sent representatives down to survey the situation at the same time as an agent of the New York based American Missionary Association. This combination of federal and philanthropic efforts to help the former slaves transition into self-sufficient citizens became known as the Port Royal Experiment. A large number of missionaries and volunteers from New York and Pennsylvania came down to establish schools and churches while the government offered supplies with the hope that the slaves would continue to work the profitable cotton fields. Following emancipation in 1863, the residents of the islands were declared freedman and the Sea Islands Experiment became an experiment in Land Redistribution. The plantation land that made up the various islands had been seized by the Union on the basis on unpaid taxes and the newly formed Freedmen’s Bureau had the authority to give away forty acres plots of land to freedman. However, the experiment was ended in 1865 by President Andrew Johnson and the seized land was returned to the previous white land owners.

1 Files (1 legal sized folder)

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Additional description, physical location.

Pamphlet Files Box 1

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correspondence
Sea Islands

Finding Aid & Administrative Information

Physical storage information.

Box: Pamphlet Files Box 1 (Mixed Materials)

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Part of the Kennedy Room of Local History and Genealogy Repository

Collection organization

Martha Johnson Sea Island papers, SCPL-PAM-007, Box: Pamphlet Files Box 1. Kennedy Room of Local History and Genealogy.

Cite Item Description

Martha Johnson Sea Island papers, SCPL-PAM-007, Box: Pamphlet Files Box 1. Kennedy Room of Local History and Genealogy. https://scplarchives-public.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/155 Accessed August 27, 2024.

IMAGES

Emerging Civil War
(a) The sea−island morphology in polymer blends illustrated by a
Schematic diagram of the ‘sea‐island’ morphology in PP/elastomer
Schematic diagram of the ‘sea‐island’ morphology in PP/elastomer
Island Experiment
PPT

COMMENTS

Port Royal Experiment
The Port Royal Experiment, also called the Sea Island Experiment, was an early humanitarian effort to prepare the former slaves of the South Carolina Sea Islands for inclusion as free citizens in American public life. The Port Royal Experiment was made possible by the U.S. Navy's conquest of the Sea Islands of Beaufort District after the ...
History 121 Ch. 14 Flashcards
The "Sea island experiment" refers to: Northern reformers efforts to assist former slaves with the transition to freedom. General Sherman marched from Atlanta tot the sea in order to: Demoralize the south's civilian population. About us. About Quizlet; How Quizlet works; Careers; Advertise with us; Get the app; For students. Flashcards;
HIST 2101 Chapter 14 Flashcards
The "Sea Island Experiment" refers to: northern reformers' efforts to assist former slaves with the transition to freedom. The Union's manpower advantage over the Confederacy: proved essential for the success of Grant's attrition strategy. What happened to Cherokee slaveholders after the Civil War?
Rehearsals for Reconstruction Flashcards
The "Sea Island Experiment" refers to: A) Northern reformers' efforts to assist former slaves with the transition to freedom B) The unsuccessful effort of General Ulysses Grant to allow former slaves to run their own farms in Mississippi C) The Confederacy's trial use of slaves as soldiers along the South Carolina coast D) A U.S. government plan to introduce advanced technology to southern ...
Port Royal Experiment
The Port Royal Experiment was a program begun during the American Civil War in which former slaves successfully worked on the land abandoned by planters. History. In 1861 the Union captured the Sea Islands off the coast ... and he was in command of 400 freed slaves on a plantation. He spent a total of 16 months at Parris Island, where he took ...
Port Royal Experiment (1862-1865)
The Port Royal Experiment, the first major attempt by Northerners to reconstruct the Southern political and economic system, began only seven months after the firing on Fort Sumter. On November 7, 1861 the Union Army occupied South Carolina's Sea Islands, freeing approximately 10,000 slaves. As … Read MorePort Royal Experiment (1862-1865)
Port Royal Experiment
Port Royal Experiment. The Port Royal Experiment has often been called a rehearsal for Reconstruction. It was designed to discover whether African Americans liberated from their slave-masters could work as free laborers. On November 7, 1861, planters on the South Carolina Sea Islands fled the Union's naval forces, leaving their enslaved laborers on the land.
The Port Royal Experiment
The Port Royal Experiment was a humanitarian mission undergirded by economic necessity and military expediency. It was there, in Port Royal and the surrounding South Carolina Sea Islands, that African American slaves first tilled the soil as free laborers. This transformation defied expectations.
Nov. 7, 1861: The Port Royal Experiment Initiated
Port Royal was the U.S. government's name for the Sea Islands, which consisted of salt marshes, tidal rivers and creeks, and low-elevation lands of deep woods and productive cotton plantations. In 1862, the Port Royal Experiment began, creating schools and hospitals for the formerly enslaved and allowing them to purchase and run local ...
Port Royal Experiment
The Port Royal Experiment (1862 - 1865) The Port Royal Experiment, the first major attempt by Northerners to reconstruct the Southern political and economic system, began only seven months after the firing on Fort Sumter. On November 7, 1861 the Union Army occupied South Carolina's Sea Islands, freeing approximately 10,000 slaves.
Beaufort & the Port Royal Experiment
17 May 2022. A new beginning. This image celebrated Emancipation Day as it was seen at Beaufort's Ft. Frederick, also known as Camp Saxton. The Port Royal Experiment started just seven months after the first shots of the Civil War were heard. Beaufort and its sea islands were occupied by the Union Army by November 7, 1861, thus freeing its ...
Emerging Civil War
The Port Royal Experiment - Setting the Stage for Reconstruction, Part One. by Ashley Webb . Posted on May 29, 2015. Sea Islands on an 1861 map. In late October of 1861, the Union Naval fleet set sail for Port Royal, South Carolina, hoping to advance Winfield Scott's plan to blockade the Confederate ports and prevent trade with European ...
Exploring U.S. History
Looking positively on the Sea Island experiment, Stevens proposed redistributing 394,000,000 acres owned by about 70,000 rebels. But he omission of land confiscation from the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 was a severe blow to the Radical Republicans, and to their plans to aid the Freedmen and break the Southern ruling class. ...
and the Land Question
the African-American population-questions at the heart of the ideals deeply held and widely espoused by Northerners- were incompletely understood and inadequately resolved in. the Civil War and Reconstruction period. By focusing on rep-. resentative participants in the Sea Islands' land sales during.
Emancipation Day: The Freed People of Port Royal
The Freed People of Port Royal. The Flora, a small steamer, paddled toward landfall where a grove of live oaks stood on a point overlooking the Beaufort River.It was January 1, 1863, a bright day, unseasonably warm. "We enjoyed perfectly the exciting scene on board the Flora," wrote Charlotte Forten, a missionary teacher, in an article for Atlantic Magazine.
Almost Emancipated: The Civil War and the Port Royal Experiment
In January 1861, Union General Sherman requested teachers from the North to train formerly enslaved people. The resulting effort, known as the Port Royal Experiment, aimed to provide newly freed African Americans of the Beaufort area with schools and hospitals, and acted as a precursor to the period of Reconstruction after the Civil War.
The "Sea Island Experiment" Refers To
The "Sea Island Experiment" refers to: A) northern reformers' efforts to assist former slaves with the transition to freedom. B) the Confederacy's trial use of slaves as soldiers along the South Carolina coast. C) a U.S.government plan to introduce advanced technology to southern farming in order to decrease the need for slaves. D) the unsuccessful effort of General Ulysses Grant to allow ...
A Lesson on What Reconstruction Could Have Been
40 Acres and a Mule: Role-Playing What Reconstruction Could Have Been. Teaching Activity. By Adam Sanchez. Rethinking Schools, 2020. This multimedia, creative role play introduces students to the ways African American life changed immediately after the Civil War by focusing on the Sea Islands before and during Reconstruction. Time Periods: 1865.
Reconstruction Quiz #1 Flashcards
Reconstruction Quiz #1. Sea Island Experiment. Click the card to flip 👆. was an experiment with Reconstruction that started when the Union Army occupied the Sea Islands of South Carolina in November 1861. The white population fled, leaving the former slaves, who took control. Northerners later arrived with their own approach, and while the ...
The Sea Island Experiment refers to Group of answer choices
The "Sea Island Experiment" refers to: Group of answer choices. northern reformers' efforts to assist former slaves with the transition to freedom. the Confederacy's trial use of slaves as soldiers along the South Carolina coast. a U.S. government plan to introduce advanced technology to southern farming in order to decrease the need ...
History of the Sea Island experiment?
By 1865, the Sea Island experiment was a huge success with black families working for wages, getting an education, and enjoying better shelter and clothing. The Sea Island Experiment refers to the ...
The "Sea Island Experiment" refers to:
Sea Island Experiment refers to a historical event that took place during the Reconstruction period after the American Civil War. The experiment involved the efforts of a group of Northern reformers, abolitionists, and missionaries to help former slaves transition to freedom on the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.
Collection: Martha Johnson Sea Island papers
Biographical / Historical. Martha Johnson (1822-1871) was a teacher from Peacham, VT. Johnson worked as a matron in a workhouse on Blackwell Island, NY and a teacher at an industrial school in New York City. In 1863, she was hired by the newly formed National Freedman's Relief Association to teach the newly freed slaves living on the Sea ...

Port Royal Experiment

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The Port Royal Experiment

“The Day of the Gun-Shoot at Bay Point”

The Gideonites

The Freed Men and Women

Land Redistribution and Sherman’s Field Order 15

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Port Royal Experiment

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Coastal Heritage Magazine

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Johns Island Wesley United Methodist Church

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Common Core State Standards

Career Technical Education Standards (California Model) – Arts, Media and Entertainment Pathway Standards

National Curriculum Standards for Social Studies – National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS)

National Standards for Music Education – National Association for Music Education (NAfME)

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The "Sea Island Experiment" Refers To

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Related Resources

﻿Reconstructing the South: A Role Play

When the Impossible Suddenly Became Possible: A Reconstruction Mixer

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Forty Acres and Maybe a Mule

Black Power U.S.A.: The Human Side of Reconstruction, 1867-1877

How to — and How Not to — Teach Role Plays

Share a story, question, or resource from your classroom.

More Teaching Resources

History of the Sea Island experiment?

Add your answer:

What were the two charter colonies?

Which colony was founded as a result of religious dissent in the New World?

When did jamica become a state?

What was the worst nuclear power plant accident in US history?

What are the answers to the history buff's crosswords plus American government and economics?

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Martha Johnson Sea Island papers

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Reconstructing the South: A Role Play