Making Freedom: Resisting and Abolishing Slavery in New England and Beyond

1863-1866

1863  Lincoln issues Final Emancipation Proclamation

1863  Volunteers of color rush to join Union military 

1863  Tour raises funds for freedmen schools  

Four of the children – Charley, Augusta, Rebecca, and Rosina (Rosa) – look White, and their light complexions contrast sharply with those of the three adults, Wilson, Mary, and Robert, and that of the fifth child, Isaac. 

The "White Slaves" propaganda campaign tour proves very successful, and historians have debated why. Some argue that depicting slaves as White suggests that Southern slavery was a threat to the freedom of all White people, regardless of class. In addition, the well-dressed appearance of the children exploits the Victorian instincts of Northerners to protect the purity, innocence, and "Whiteness" of youthfulness and femininity.

Other scholars note that much of the power of the photographs stems from allusions to physical abuse, including the sexual exploitation by White “masters” of their enslaved female workers, and the branding and whipping scars on four of the enslaved people in the group.

1863  Eldest son of Frederick Douglass enlists 

1863  Abraham Galloway: Militant activist, Union spy, civil rights leader

Galloway acts as the chief representative of more than 10,000 formerly enslaved African Americans who had crossed Confederate lines and found refuge in New Bern and in makeshift camps they had constructed nearby. Eventually, a midnight meeting is arranged at a boarding house owned by local activist Mary Anne Starkey, a free Black woman. Kinsley is led, blindfolded, to the candlelit attic where Galloway and several fellow activists are waiting for him. 

In the conversation that follows, they tell Kinsley that they have little faith in Abraham Lincoln’s commitment to African Americans. Since the Emancipation Proclamation four months earlier, the president has yet to take any steps to guarantee their full rights as American citizens, and they complain about racial prejudice against, and ill-treatment of, Black residents by the Union’s occupying force in the New Bern area – including the closure of treasured Black schools set up by community activists, and the surrender of a young formerly enslaved woman to a White man who had claimed her as his property. 

Galloway’s lack of trust is also informed by own experience as an Army spy: Only weeks earlier he had been involved in the siege of Vicksburg, Mississippi, where the Union Army had “confiscated” some 1,000 Black men from local plantations to build a canal. When Union commanders had abandoned the project, they had also abandoned the men – who faced execution or re-enslavement if captured by the Confederates. He himself had been taken prisoner but had managed to escape.  

In the meeting with Kinsley, Galloway and his comrades list four conditions that must be met before Black men in New Bern will enlist: they must receive pay equal to that of the Massachusetts Black regiments; the Army must provide for their families, who are nearly all refugees, while they serve; schools must be set up so that their children can learn to read and write; and the U.S. government must guarantee that, if captured, the Black soldiers would have all the rights of legitimate military prisoners of war.

Galloway places the muzzle of his revolver in Kinsley’s ear and demands that he swear to meet these conditions. 

Kinsley pledges to do so, although it is not clear he had been granted the latitude to make such guarantees. Certainly, he has no power over the treatment of prisoners-of-war by Confederates. But two of the promises he makes, for schools and the support of families left behind, are later fulfilled. Equal pay remains a contentious issue until the end of the war.

Kinsley, Wild, and Galloway eventually collaborate to raise three regiments of Black infantry. General William T. Sherman raises a fourth when his forces crossed the Carolinas during his March to the Sea campaign that led to the eventual surrender of the Confederates. By the end of the war, 5,000 North Carolina Black men – most of them formerly enslaved – had fought alongside 174,000 other Black soldiers in 175 Union Army regiments. More than 68,000 of them had laid down their lives.

The uncompromising stance of Abraham Galloway in the negotiations with Kinsley is a hallmark of his all-too-short but brilliant career as a political leader, grassroots organizer, orator, and state legislator.

Galloway is born into slavery in Smithville, a seaside hamlet at the mouth of the Cape Fear River, 28 miles downriver from Wilmington, North Carolina. His mother, Hester Hankins, is enslaved by the widow of a Methodist clergyman, and his White father, John Wesley Galloway, whose extended family includes several leading local planters, makes his living as a boatman. Abraham Galloway trains and works as a brick mason. 

At the age of 20, he and a close friend, Richard Eden, decide to escape to freedom in the north. They stow away on a northbound ship, hiding among navy stores – barrels of tar, rosin, and spirits of turpentine. Port authorities in Wilmington regularly use turpentine smoke to flush out any would-be escapees from slavery before a ship’s departure, and Galloway and Eden have fashioned shrouds from oilcloth to protect themselves. 

As luck would have it, the fumigating crew never comes on board and the two men safely reach freedom in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Aided by local abolitionists with the Underground Railroad, they travel on to Boston, Massachusetts and then to Canada. 

In the ensuing months, Galloway works with militant Black abolitionist societies in Canada West (later Ontario), and puts his life at risk by crossing back into the U.S. to make anti-slavery speeches in Ohio and elsewhere. He then visits Haiti, where formerly enslaved Haitians have established a revolutionary Black republic in the former French colony. He helps Black American and Black Canadian activists who had settled in Haiti with a fledgling plan to send a guerrilla force to the American South designed, like radical abolitionist John Brown’s ill-fated raid on a federal armory in West Virginia, to incite a widespread uprising among the enslaved.  

While Galloway is in Haiti, the Southern states secede from the Union. He returns to the U.S. two weeks before the Civil War begins, and is recruited into the Union spy service on the recommendation of George Stearns, a wealthy white Boston industrialist and abolitionist who had helped to bankroll John Brown. It is not known when or how they met. Union leaders recognize that formerly enslaved people can make excellent spies in the South because they are accustomed to living by guile and stealth and can fade unobtrusively into local Black communities.  

Galloway undertakes numerous secret intelligence-gathering missions behind Confederate lines in Virginia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and North Carolina. “From his work as a spy,” writes historian David S. Cecelski, author of The Fire of Freedom: Abraham Galloway & the Slaves’ Civil War, “he also came to know the best and worst of the Union Army’s conduct toward African Americans in the parts of the South that Lincoln’s troops first took from the Confederacy. Those experiences shaped his political outlook, compelled him eventually to break with the Union Army, and led him ultimately to forsake the shadows for a more public life.”

While he continues to assist Union officers to recruit Black soldiers, Galloway shifts his priorities from “the cartridge box” to the “ballot box” – and the achievement of Black political equality after the war. He speaks frequently at Black churches that have become the heart of political education and community organizing in the freedmens' camps, and addresses mass rallies held by the formerly enslaved on Independence Day and the anniversary of Emancipation Day. At some point, he also manages to effect the escape of his mother, Hester Hankins, from slavery in Confederate-held Wilmington, North Carolina and they are reunited in New Bern. 

On April 29, 1864, Galloway leads a group of Black southern delegates that travels to Washington, D.C. and meets with President Abraham Lincoln to argue for voting rights and citizenship for African Americans. Galloway is later chosen by freedmen in New Bern to serve as a North Carolina delegate for the National Convention of Colored Men of the United States in Syracuse, New York that gives birth to the National Equal Rights League (NERL), the nation’s first truly national civil rights organization. Following the convention, Galloway embarks on a speaking tour of the North to stoke support for the NERL and Black political rights; he addresses mass meetings, mainly in Black churches, in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey.

In 1868, amid increasingly organized violence from the Ku Klux Klan in Reconstruction-era North Carolina, Galloway is elected as a Republican senator to the state’s General Assembly. 

Threatened with assassination, Galloway wears a pistol in his belt wherever he goes for self-protection and as a symbol of defiance. Denied the opportunity to become literate – teaching African Americans to read or write is illegal under state law – Galloway nonetheless demonstrates “extraordinary gifts as an orator and instantly became an influential legislator,” according to David Cecelski. Galloway is “an intelligent and ferocious debater” and “the kind of man whose biting sense of humor and sharp eye for hypocrisy inspired senate conservatives to steer away from a direct argument with him. Few of his fellow senators had ever been compelled to confront a black man as an equal, much less a black man as fearless and battle-tested as Galloway.”

As a senator, Galloway focuses on working for the fundamental rights of the newly emancipated, including citizenship, due process and equal protection under the law, and voting rights. He introduces a successful bill that helps formerly enslaved people retain homes and land given to them while in bondage even if they lack documentary proof of ownership. He steadfastly advocates for labor rights, including a 10-hour working day, and women’s rights; he twice introduces bills to amend the state’s constitution to allow women to vote. With Republican allies, he helps create a state board of education and North Carolina’s first statewide system of public schooling. 

On September 1, 1870, shortly after his re-election to the senate for a second term, Galloway dies unexpectedly at the age of 33. He leaves behind his wife, Martha Ann, and their two sons, John and Abraham, Jr. About 6,000 mourners, including hundreds of White citizens, attend his funeral. One newspaper calls it the largest funeral in the state’s history. 

Historian David Cecelski writes that Abraham Galloway “played a leading role in an extraordinary generation of African American activists within the South.

“His is the oft-told story of the rebel hero who lives a life so deeply unreconciled to tyranny that even the most downtrodden and despised are moved to believe, at least for that brilliant moment of its flashing across the night sky, that freedom and justice may not be just a dream.”

1863  Anti-Black racism fuels deadly draft riots  

The rioters initially target only military and government buildings, symbols of the perceived unfairness of the draft. But soon they variously attack, burn, and loot newspaper offices, police stations, Black homes and businesses, and the Colored Orphan Asylum that shelters 233 Black children (all of whom are safely evacuated by staff and police before the building goes up in flames). White mobs also beat, torture, and/or kill numerous Black people, including one man who is attacked by a crowd of 400 with clubs and paving stones, then lynched and burned.

Near the docks, tensions that had been brewing since the mid-1850s between White longshoremen and Black workers boil over. White dockworkers destroy dance halls, boarding houses, tenements, and brothels that cater to Black people, and strip the clothing off the White owners of these businesses.

The violence subsides after the federal government suspends draft activities, and several thousand state militia and federal troops occupy the city and restore order. On August 19, officials resume the draft and complete it within 10 days without further incident.

Historically, New York City had maintained strong business ties to the South – before the war, cotton had represented 40 percent of all the goods shipped out of the city’s port, and textile mills processing Southern cotton had been an economic mainstay of upstate New York. But to the dismay of Confederate sympathizers and the White pro-slavery supporters of the Democratic Party, particularly Irish immigrants, support for emancipation had been steadily increasing with abolitionist speakers drawing huge audiences, Black and White, in the city and across the state.  

Now, in the wake of the devastating riots, the Union League Club – a recently formed elite group of 500 New York City professionals and intellectuals that supports the Union, abolition and Black uplift – spearheads a relief effort that provides aid totaling $40,000 ($995,390 in 2024) to almost 2,500 riot victims.  

In December of 1863, the Union League Club is given permission by the Secretary of War to raise a Black regiment. Three months later 1,000 newly enlisted recruits to the Twentieth Regiment, United States Colored Troops, march through the streets of New York to the Hudson River, where the ship that will take them south is waiting. A multi-racial crowd of 100,000 New Yorkers cheers them on.    

1863  Attack on fort repelled; 280 Union casualties

Eventually, some 200,000 Black Americans will serve in the Union ranks – including an extraordinary 78 percent of free Black men of military age in the free states. As the New York Times Magazine's 1619 Project notes, these men face greater risk than White soldiers. Confederate troops often kill Black soldiers rather than capture them; they also enslave Black prisoners of war. 

Thousands of Black women also contribute to the war effort. They serve as cooks, nurses and spies, and also deny their valuable labor to Confederates by escaping to Union lines. 

President Lincoln acknowledges that Black contributions helped to turn the tide of the war in favor of the Union.

In the opinion of many historians, the Emancipation Proclamation changes the meaning and purpose of the Civil War. No longer a struggle just to preserve the Union, it is also focused on liberating the enslaved.   

The initiative has significant international impact, too. As Lincoln had hoped, it turns foreign popular opinion in favor of the Union by gaining the support of anti-slavery countries – especially Britain and France and others in Europe that have already abolished slavery. This shift dooms the Confederacy's hopes of gaining official recognition from overseas, making it increasingly isolated. 

Boston-born historian and author Henry Adams, whose father is the U.S. Ambassador to Britain at the time, comments: "The Emancipation Proclamation has done more for us than all our former victories and all our diplomacy."

Notably, the Proclamation no longer includes mention of colonization – Lincoln’s plan to deport African Americans to one or more overseas colonies. He had advocated for colonization in his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation and had urged Congress to pass a constitutional amendment to support the project. By the end of the Civil War, Lincoln has abandoned these efforts, and advocates for the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution to abolish slavery. 

Historian Christopher Bonner, author of Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship, believes Lincoln’s change of heart is influenced in part by Frederick Douglass, the Black abolitionist whom he holds in high esteem, and by the valor of the Black soldiers who have helped save the Union.

In the Final Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln gives the green light to something that Black leaders have long called for: the ability for Black men to enlist in the Union forces and fight for their freedom.

1864  Another Massachusetts regiment of color forms 

1864  Gavel made from whipping post gifted to activists

Andrew continues: “I know of no place more fitting for the preservation of these memorials of the barbarous institution that is now tottering to its rapidly approaching fall, than the association of free colored citizens of Massachusetts over which you preside.” 

According to historian Stephen Kantrowitz, author of More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829-1889, this recognition by Governor Andrew is viewed as more than symbolic. For Lewis Hayden, it portends a new relationship between free African Americans and the nation. The gifts, Hayden tells his Masonic brethren, represent the materials “colored citizens,” north and south, would need as they completed the era’s great work. The gavel, once used “to subdue the corporeal man to a tyrant’s will” would bring ennobling law and justice. The boat, he says, bears witness to the fugitive’s faith in the fruits of God’s creation to carry him to freedom.

1864  U.S. soldiers kill, rape Native people promised asylum 

In fact, after years of bloodshed, and with few other options, six chiefs of the Southern Cheyenne (Black Kettle, White Antelope, Lean Bear, Little Wolf, Tall Bear, and Left Hand) and four Arapaho chiefs (Little Raven, Storm, Shave-Head, and Big Mouth) had already committed themselves to peace. By signing the Treaty of Fort Wise in 1861, they had given up all but one-thirteenth of the lands designated to them by the Treaty of Fort Laramie a decade before. In exchange, the two tribes had been promised peaceful asylum in a designated new reserve near a tributary of the Arkansas River called Big Sandy Creek.

But Colonel John Milton Chivington, who commands the newly mustered 3rd Colorado Infantry, apparently does not believe in peace treaties. A Methodist minister and acclaimed Civil War hero, Chivington tells his 675-strong force: “Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians! I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God’s heaven to kill Indians. Kill and scalp all, big and little.”

The soldiers take Chivington at his word. In a day-long rampage of murder, rape, and mutilation, they chase down men, women, and children in the Sand Creek village and kill them without mercy. They take scalps and other body parts as battle trophies, including human fetuses and male and female genitalia. In their unrelenting attacks, the soldiers use more than a ton of cannon and rifle ammunition. 

In the weeks immediately following the massacre, Chivington is praised for his “heroic victory” at Sand Creek. The colonel is even honored with a parade through the streets of Denver, and he publicly displays his battle trophies in theaters and saloons. Later, a Congressional investigation of the atrocity condemns the conduct of Chivington and his troops but no criminal charges are brought against them. Chivington resigns from the service in 1865.

The Sand Creek Massacre is an especially gruesome example of the impacts on Native peoples of relentless White settler expansion – as well as the consequences of a war over slavery that is not of their own making. As historian Clarissa W. Confer, author of The Cherokee Nation in the Civil War, writes: “In the midst of a war fought on land that once was theirs, over a nation that denied them citizenship, Native Americans found themselves faced with a dubious decision: Whose side should they be fighting for?”

According to the National Museum of the American Indian, approximately 3,503 Native Americans serve in the Union Army. Although exact numbers are not known, many more Native people ally with the Confederacy. Even more participate indirectly, aiding or sabotaging one side or another while remaining outside the military.

Clarissa Confer states that the experience of the Civil War for many Native Americans is primarily defined by their geographical location.  

East of the Mississippi, decades of war, disease, land theft and encroachment, and marginalization as a result of White settlement have so diminished tribal lands that most of the 30,000 Native Americans in the Union do not live in powerful tribal units. 

“The Indian minority was concerned less about the divisive issues of slavery and the preservation of the American Constitution,” writes Confer, “than about their ongoing struggle to hold on to their remaining land and culture. If fighting for the Union cause brought the respect and perhaps gratitude of those in power, then it was a means to an end. Army service also brought regular pay and food, adventure, and the continuation of an honorable tradition of Native warriors.”

Indigenous Americans all over the North take up arms for the Union cause. Company K of the 1st Michigan Sharpshooters enlists more than 150 Ottawa, Chippewa, Delaware, Huron, Oneida, and Potawatomi Indians. In Massachusetts, Nipmuc tribal members who serve include Alexander Freeman Hemenway in the Massachusetts 54th Infantry Regiment and brothers Samuel Thomas, Benjamin W. Thomas, and George F. Thomas in the 5th Regiment, Massachusetts Cavalry. The ranks of Rhode Island’s 4th Infantry Regiment include George S. Thomas, also Nipmuc.  

Native Americans living on the ever-shifting Western frontier confront a very different situation. Neutrality is not an option for those in strategic locations. An area that later becomes the state of Oklahoma is a case in point: Lands known as “Indian Territory” –  set aside by the U.S. government for Native Americans displaced by its Indian removal policies – lie directly between Confederate and Union territory. And Native nations in the area face mounting pressure to take sides. 

The choice is not an easy one. The five southeastern Indian nations – the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole – are still struggling to stabilize their societies after their forced removal to Indian Territory 20 years before. The federal government provides them with annuities – annual allocations of money and goods –  for surrendering their lands in the East; and such payments can be critical to their survival. But tribal members have developed strong economic, social, and religious ties to the surrounding Southern culture. Each of the five nations decides independently which side to support, and each chooses the Confederacy. 

As Confer explains, military service quickly becomes complicated for the Cherokees as they are ordered to attack a neighboring Creek faction loyal to the Union. This demand, which runs counter to ideas of Native kinship and values, causes unrest among Cherokee troops, and many leave Confederate service. Soon after, the Cherokees’ principal chief, John Ross, pledges his allegiance to the United States for the remainder of the war. The Cherokees are now sending men to don both blue and gray, causing internal civil war within their nation. 

Seminoles, too, are split and fight for both sides. However, the Choctaw and Chickasaw – heavily engaged in a slave-based, cash crop market economy – remain united in their allegiance to the Confederacy. Fighting rages in Indian Territory for most of the war, and takes a terrible toll; the resulting devastation, poverty, disease, and dislocation undermine and threaten to destroy Native societies.  

The value of Native American recruits grows as the Civil War drags on and more and more White men die. At the war’s end, it is a Native American – General Ely S. Parker, a member of the Seneca tribe and a lawyer – who prepares the articles of surrender that Confederate General Robert E. Lee signs on April 9, 1865. Parker serves as military secretary to victorious Union General Ulysses S. Grant.

At the signing ceremony at Appomattox Court House in Virginia, Lee remarks to Parker, "I am glad to see one real American here." To which Parker replies, "We are all Americans."

1865  Tunis Campbell: Champions Black self-reliance  

Within months of taking up his Georgia post, Campbell has facilitated the resettlement of nearly 800 refugees on three of the islands – St. Catherine’s, Sapelo, and Ossabaw. Initially provided with government rations, the new settlers soon secure a steady food supply from abundant local fish and wild game, and from the corn, vegetables, and fruit they are able to grow. Schools are established with teachers who include Campbell’s wife, Harriet, and adopted son, Edward.

Campbell takes the lead in establishing a government for the settlement modeled after the U.S. constitution. It has an eight-person Senate, a 20-person House of Representatives, and a judicial system capped by a Supreme Court. As historian Russell Duncan writes in his book, Freedmen’s Shore: Tunis Campbell and the Georgia Freedmen: “Campbell had determined to teach the democratic process. This functioning example of representative government would afford the former slaves a chance to experience firsthand the workings of republicanism and therefore help their conversion to freedom. Campbell busily prepared them for the future when they would vote.”  

Sherman’s order had specified that the new communities “would be governed entirely by Black people themselves” and Whites would not be allowed on the islands. Nonetheless, the freedmen are mindful of the anti-democratic forces arrayed against them – including some of the wealthiest enslavers in the U.S. whose former lands they now cultivate. Campbell establishes a militia company of some 275 citizen-soldiers to defend their newly gained freedom and property.

But their future comes under threat after Abraham Lincoln is assassinated and Andrew Johnson, a Southern Democrat, succeeds him as president. Johnson pardons ex-Confederate landowners in the region who then attempt to reclaim the islands. A colluding federal official deploys federal troops to force the freedmen’s militia to allow Whites to enter. The official, Davis Tillson, also compels Black settlers without valid land claims to sign labor contracts with returning Whites, most of whom are former enslavers. And he manufactures an excuse to fire Campbell for alleged misconduct.

Convinced that the freedmen will not obtain land or justice from Tillson, Campbell looks for an alternative site for an independent and autonomous Black community. He finds it in nearby McIntosh County. Using his own money for a downpayment, he buys 1,250 acres of the former Belle Ville plantation from a northern sympathizer. Twenty-six families choose to accompany Campbell and relocate there, and they row or sail to Belle Ville in a flotilla of small boats. 

Starting from scratch on the war-devastated plantation – they fashion huts from old boards and palmetto branches for immediate shelter – the freedmen divide up the land into plots of 10-20 acres on a rent-to-buy basis. They create the Belle Ville Farmers’ Association as a governing body, and grow corn and other food crops for their subsistence and cotton for sale.

By 1867, Radical Republicans have gained control of the U.S. Congress. Campbell and the Belle Ville freedmen take advantage of new federal civil rights laws – that include voting rights – to build a Black power base in McIntosh County. 

Campbell becomes one of Georgia’s leading Radicals, a prominent member of Georgia’s Union Republican party, and one of three Black senators in the state legislature. He champions Black suffrage, free public schools for all children, integrated juries, abolishing imprisonment for debt – the exploitation of Black labor includes putting debtors in state work camps – and ending discrimination on public transportation. At the same time, as an elected justice of the peace in McIntosh County, Campbell works to uphold the legal rights of Black residents there.    

Unsurprisingly, the charismatic and influential Campbell becomes a prime target for Whites seeking to regain their political power and enforce White supremacy. He and other non-White lawmakers are expelled from the state legislature – on the illegitimate grounds that Black people have no right to hold public office in Georgia. 

Meanwhile, with a conservative counterrevolution surging across the South, violence escalates. In 1868 alone, there are more 350 lynchings and assaults on Black people in Georgia. Despite the dangers, a biracial group of registrars travels through several counties registering voters. Black registrars like Campbell are often met with brutal violence from the Ku Klux Klan and others. Indeed, at one point he and another Black registrar are poisoned. Campbell survives but the other man dies. Amid continuing threats to his life, Campbell is protected by a volunteer militia that guards the family home.  

White supremacists are determined to remove Campbell from office, and he is indicted on multiple trumped-up charges in the 1870s. His supporters rally to his defense. In one case, 300 of them – fully armed – occupy and surround a courthouse where Campbell is being arraigned. 

His enemies finally succeed. He is convicted for allegedly falsely imprisoning a White man, and sentenced to a year of hard labor at a convict labor camp. Campbell and his wife, Harriet, write to U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant and request relief from the misdeeds of conspiring Democrats. And hundreds of Campbell’s supporters petition Grant for federal protection against the illegal jailing of Black leaders and voters, and ask for troops or rifles to protect themselves. 

Campbell is released from incarceration in January 1877. Concerned that continued persecution will soon put him back behind bars, he moves to Washington, D.C. There he tries unsuccessfully to win the support of the new president, Rutherford B. Hayes, for more help and protection for Black Georgians. He also writes his second book, Sufferings of the Reverend T.G. Campbell and His Family in Georgia.

Russell Duncan notes that Campbell and other Black leaders in the South “failed to halt the counterrevolution of planter power” that had re-established itself everywhere by 1877. “Yet even when the whites finally removed him from the county by putting him in the chain-gang, Campbell’s well-organized, racially unified machine withstood the onslaught. It remained an active force in McIntosh County politics for forty years.”  

In a Washington Post article, journalist Jess McHugh comments: “Some 150 years later, amid racial justice protests and voter suppression efforts, Campbell remains emblematic of the struggle to ensure Black Americans not only have the right to vote, but also to exercise the full scope of citizenship: as activists, as small-business owners and as politicians.”                     

Tunis Campbell dies in Boston, Massachusetts on December 4, 1891. Today, the descendants of the people he led honor him with their annual “Tunis Campbell Celebrations” in Brunswick, Georgia.

1865  Key land reform program is tragically short-lived

Frazier cites land as the number one priority for the formerly enslaved. “The way we can best take care of ourselves,” he says, “is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor … and we can soon maintain ourselves and have something to spare.… We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own.” 

When asked where the newly emancipated would rather live –  “whether scattered among the whites or in colonies by themselves,” – Frazier replies that they would prefer to live by themselves, “for there is a prejudice against us in the South that will take years to get over..." 

Both these expressed preferences are honored in Sherman’s order. The first section states that “the islands from Charleston, south, the abandoned rice fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. Johns river, Florida, are reserved and set apart for the settlement of the negroes [sic] now made free by the acts of war and the proclamation of the President of the United States.”

Section three specifies that these new communities will, moreover, be governed entirely by Black people themselves: " …on the islands, and in the settlements hereafter to be established, no white person whatever, unless military officers and soldiers detailed for duty, will be permitted to reside; and the sole and exclusive management of affairs will be left to the freed people themselves.… By the laws of war, and orders of the President of the United States, the negro [sic] is free and must be dealt with as such.”

Finally, section three specifies the allocation of land: “…each family shall have a plot of not more than (40) acres of tillable ground, and when it borders on some water channel, with not more than 800 feet waterfront, in the possession of which land the military authorities will afford them protection, until such time as they can protect themselves, or until Congress shall regulate their title.”

According to historian Eric Foner, author of A Short History of Reconstruction, the response to Sherman’s order is immediate, with freedmen hastening to take advantage of it. Baptist minister Ulysses L. Houston, one of the group that had met with Sherman, leads 1,000 African Americans to Skidaway Island, Georgia, where they establish a self-governing community with Houston as the “black governor.” By June, some 40,000 freedmen had settled on the 400,000 acres of ‘Sherman Land.' (Sherman later orders the army to lend the new settlers mules for plowing and other farm tasks; hence the well-known phrase “40 Acres and a Mule.”)

But this visionary program – which historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr. says “would have fundamentally altered the course of American race relations” – is tragically short-lived. 

In the fall of 1865, Andrew Johnson, a sympathizer with the South who has been vice-president, assumes the presidency after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. He overturns Sherman’s order and returns the lands along the South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida coasts to the planters who had originally owned them – some of the same people who had declared war on the United States of America.

1865  Death toll makes war bloodiest in U.S. history

In We Were Eight Years in Power, a collection of articles he penned for The Atlantic magazine, writer and activist Ta-Nehisi Coates writes: “When it comes to the Civil War, all of our popular understanding, our popular history and culture, our great films, the subtext of our arguments are in defiance of its painful truths. It is not a mistake that Gone with The Wind is one of the most read works of American literature or that The Birth of a Nation is the most revered touchstone of all American film. Both emerge from a need for palliatives and painkillers, an escape from the truth of those five short years in which 750,000 American soldiers were killed, more than all American soldiers killed in all other American wars combined, in a war declared for the cause of expanding ‘African slavery.’ 

“That war was inaugurated not reluctantly, but lustily, by men who believed property in humans to be the cornerstone of civilization, to be an edict of God, and so delivered their own children to his maw. And when that war was done, the now-defeated God lived on, honored through the human sacrifice of lynching and racist pogroms....”

Coates continues: “The implications of the true story are existential and corrosive to our larger national myth. To understand that the most costly war in this country’s history was launched in direct opposition to everything the country claims to be, to understand that this war was the product of centuries of enslavement, which is to see an even longer, more total war, is to alter the accepted conception of America as a beacon of freedom. How does one face the truth or forge a national identity out of it?”

1865  March honors fallen Union war captives  

Three thousand Black school children carry bouquets of flowers and sing “John Brown’s Body.” Members of the famed 54th Massachusetts and other Black Union regiments perform double-time marches. And Black ministers recite Bible verses. 

The gathering at the race track is believed to be the earliest Memorial Day commemoration on record. But it is lost to history for 131 years. In 1996, a curator at Harvard University’s Houghton Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts asks historian David Blight if he would like to look through two boxes of unsorted material from Union veterans. 

Inside a file labeled “First Decoration Day” is a narrative by an old veteran written on a piece of cardboard that tells the story of the race track commemoration, plus a date referencing an article in The New York Tribune. Blight’s subsequent search for other written references to the event reveals only one: In 1916 correspondence between a women’s Civil War historical society in New Orleans and its sister chapter in Charleston. 

“This was a story that had really been suppressed both in the local memory and certainly the national memory,” says Blight. “But nobody who had witnessed it could ever have forgotten it.”

In 2001, after his book Race and Reunion is published, Blight gives a talk about Memorial Day at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. After the event concludes, an older Black woman approaches him. “You mean that story is true?” she asks Blight. “I grew up in Charleston, and my granddaddy used to tell us this story of a parade at the old race track, and we never knew whether to believe him or not.”

In 1871, the remains of the “Martyrs of the Race Course” are exhumed and reburied with honors at military cemeteries in Beaufort and Florence, South Carolina. 

For Blight, it is less important whether the 1865 commemoration is officially recognized as the first Memorial Day. “It’s the fact that this occurred in Charleston at a cemetery site for the Union dead in a city where the Civil war had begun, and that it was organized and done by African American former slaves is what gives it such poignancy.”

1865  Freedmen organize first Juneteenth 

Today, “Juneteenth” – an amalgam of June and nineteenth – is widely celebrated in African American communities throughout the U.S. and is now a national holiday. President Joe Biden declared it so on June 17, 2021, after years of campaigning by activists for such recognition.

In an article in The Guardian newspaper, Akin Olla, a Nigerian American political strategist and organizer, notes that despite General Granger’s 1867 announcement, “white slave owners fought to keep people in bondage, even killing Black people who fled for their freedom. Freedom had been declared in words, but it would take the military might of the Union army to enforce. This speaks volumes to how deeply the culture and economics of slavery were embedded in the United States, and to the kind of force necessary to uproot it. 

“Of course, this uprooting was in many ways incomplete; while the post-slavery Reconstruction era brought many political and economic freedoms to Black Americans in the south, much of that progress would be corrupted by the slavery-like programs of sharecropping and the establishment of the prison-industrial complex that persists today.” 

1865  Refugees in Canada start coming home

An abolitionist, author, and minister born into slavery in Maryland, Josiah Henson is believed to have inspired the title character in Harriet Beecher Stowe's best-selling novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. In his early years, Henson experiences the savage cruelty of slavery in the Charles County plantation where he and his family are enslaved. As he later recounts in his 1849 autobiography, Henson witnesses his father receiving one hundred lashes, and having his right ear nailed to the whipping post and then cut off, for standing up to a slave overseer. 

Henson himself suffers at the hands of a sadistic overseer from a neighboring plantation who breaks one of his arms and both his shoulder blades. He eventually escapes with his family to Canada via Buffalo, New York. Later he becomes a Methodist preacher and the spiritual leader of a self-sufficient community that, at its height, numbers some 500 people. They sustain themselves in part by exporting black walnut lumber to the U.S. and Britain. 

Henry Bibb, who had fled slavery in Kentucky, edits The Voice of the Fugitive, one of the earliest Black newspapers in Canada. Bibb makes several failed attempts to escape his enslavement before he succeeds. He crosses into Canada from Detroit, Michigan, and subsequently devotes much of his time to strengthening the Underground Railroad network in the Detroit River region that had assisted him to reach freedom. Bibb also travels and lectures throughout the United States with Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists. He chronicles his life experiences in a book, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave, Written by Himself. 

Racism, oppression and segregation in Canada – and the promise of improved conditions and prospects for African Americans in the U.S. after the Civil War – persuade many to come home. According to the Canadian Museum of Immigration, in the weeks and months after President Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, about two thirds of the Black American refugees in Canada return to the United States.

1865  KKK founded; will boast over 500,000 New England members in 1920s  

The Klan and similar organizations, including the Knights of the White Camelia and the Pale Faces, are largely independent and decentralized but share aims and tactics to form a vast network of terrorist cells. By the 1868 presidential election, those cells are poised to act as a unified military force supporting the cause of White supremacy throughout the South. During the election, from Arkansas to Georgia, thousands of Black people are killed. Similar campaigns of lynchings, tar-and-featherings, rapes, and other violent attacks on those challenging White supremacy become a hallmark of the Klan. 

In an opinion piece in The New York Times, historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr. writes: “So determined were most white Southerners to maintain their own way of life that they resorted to fraud, intimidation and murder in order to re-establish their own control of the state governments. . . . The new civil war within the Southern states stemmed from an adamant determination to restore white supremacy.”

The first leader, or “grand wizard” of the Ku Klux Klan, is Nathan Bedford Forrest, a well-known Confederate general. Forrest directs a hierarchy of members with outlandish titles, such as “Imperial Wizard” and “Exalted Cyclops.” Hooded costumes, violent “night rides,” and the notion that the group comprises an “invisible empire” confer a mystique that only adds to the Klan’s popularity.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit that tracks hate groups, the “first era” Klan disbands after a short but violent period when it becomes evident that “Jim Crow [segregation] laws would secure White supremacy across the country.” In 1915, the Ku Klux Klan is revived by White Protestants near Atlanta, Georgia. In addition to the group’s anti-Black ideological core, this second iteration of the Klan also opposes Catholic and Jewish immigrants. A growing fear of communism and immigration broadens the Klan’s base throughout the South and into the Midwest, with a particular stronghold in Indiana. 

In the 1920s, the KKK experiences another resurgence and expands into the northern states and Canada. The Klan becomes a mass movement “attaining a membership of between three and six million women and men, thus becoming one of the largest social movements in U.S. history,” writes historian Mark Paul Richard in his 2015 book, Not a Catholic Nation: The Ku Klux Klan Confronts New England in the 1920s. 

According to Richard, the KKK generates appeal beyond the South because it has evolved: In addition to promoting White supremacy, the Klan embraces such themes as Americanism, nativism, prohibition, and traditional moral and family values. Demonstrating the organization’s strength, 25,000 Klan members in full regalia march down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. on August 8, 1925. 

At Klan rallies, speakers warn that "real" Americans are losing control of the country.  Foreigners, especially Catholics and Jews, will soon outnumber White, Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Such claims, writes Richard, appeal to those New Englanders who resent the recent influx of thousands of French Canadians; the latter are not only Catholic but, in the view of KKK members and sympathizers, are also willing to accept lower wages than native-born workers. Anti-Irish and anti-Italian prejudice is also prevalent.  

According to The Washington Post, when the KKK’s New England membership peaks in 1925, the Klan has admitted 150,141 members in Maine; 130,780 in Massachusetts;  80,301 in Vermont; 75,000 in New Hampshire; 65,590 in Connecticut; and 21,321 in Rhode Island. 

Worcester, Massachusetts becomes a center of Klan activity, writes Richard. In October 1924, an estimated 15,000 Klansmen and Klanswomen from throughout New England assemble at an agricultural fairground in Worcester, where they initiate up to 2,600 candidates into Klanhood. Celebrations include an air show, with a fly-over by a biplane with “K.K.K.” and “100 per cent American” painted on the sides. 

Grassroots resistance to the Klan and its rallies, cross-burnings, and threats of violence – particularly against Black, Jewish, and Catholic families and institutions – is widespread throughout Massachusetts. Some of the opposition is violent: Organized vigilantes and others who attack and disrupt KKK rallies are armed with stones, clubs, baseball bats, revolvers, and rifles.    

The Klan arises a third time during the 1960s to oppose the civil rights movement and preserve segregation through bombings, murders and other attacks. Their many victims include four young girls – Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins – who are killed while preparing for Sunday services at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963; and civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner who are slain in Mississippi in 1964.

The legacy of the original Klan, and the figureheads of the Confederacy before it, are enshrined in the “Cult of the Lost Cause” – the notion that the cause of the Confederate States during the Civil War was just, heroic, and centered on preserving states’ rights, not on slavery; moreover, slavery was not only benign but a “positive good.”  

These sentiments were and are expressed publicly in statues, monuments, and place names honoring Confederate leaders, most of which were created during the era of Jim Crow segregation laws, beginning in the 1890s. Only in recent years – after gaining significant attention through large counter protests and after deadly attacks from far-right extremists – have some of these memorials been removed and the public spaces they occupied renamed. 

On July 9, 2020, Tennessee’s State Capitol Commission voted to remove the bust of KKK founding leader Nathan Bedford Forrest from the state Capitol building. It was subsequently placed in the Tennessee State Museum.

1865  Planters mull plan to import Chinese laborers 

Encouraged by reports that planters in Louisiana and Cuba had successfully substituted  Chinese laborers for enslaved Africans, a group of elite planters in Natchez, Mississippi, led by fellow planter and Massachusetts-born lawyer Josiah Winchester, develop a plan to import thousands of contracted laborers directly from China to work on Natchez plantations. 

Winchester and his two business associates team up to finance the venture and anticipate handsome returns. They calculate that the first 500 Chinese – who would each be paid $84 a year – could earn them a net profit of $60,000 ($1.25 million today). But lack of sufficient backing from planters and investors eventually forces them to abandon the entire scheme.  

In different ways, Southern planters and their descendants work to protect their fortunes and investments during and after the war. In Masters of The Big House, Scarborough’s list of elite planters includes a number with New England connections, including the following:

• William T. Palfrey, a sugar planter, who, like his Boston, Massachusetts-born father and three of his four brothers, settled in Louisiana. He has 323 enslaved workers on his plantation. Relations between the Palfrey brothers must have become strained during the war, writes Scarborough. William’s eldest brother, John, who remains in Massachusetts, is active in the anti-slavery movement, while William bitterly condemns both “abolitionists & fire eaters” for “the dreadful state of things.” 

• Stephen Clay King, born in Palmer, Massachusetts, who is one of the two largest rice planters in Camden County, Georgia with 263 enslaved workers.

• Massachusetts-born “cotton king” Samuel F. Davis, who holds  523 people in bondage on his plantation in Concordia, Louisiana in the 1840s. By the beginning of the war, his sons and son-in-laws have expanded his empire to include nine plantations in the parish with 1,307 enslaved workers. 

• The descendants of Oliver J. Morgan, born in Hillsborough, New Hampshire, who are part of one of the most prominent planter families in Louisiana. Morgan makes his fortune from cotton. At his death in 1860, his enslaved workforce numbers 353 people.   

• Samuel S. Boyd, a lawyer and later judge originally from Portland, Maine, who moves to Natchez, Mississippi as a young man. By 1860, he and his business partner, the former slave trader Rice C. Ballard, have built a plantation empire encompassing at least six plantations with 500 or more enslaved workers in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas.

• Zebulon York, a native of Avon, Maine, and a Confederate Army general and pre-war lawyer. He and his business partner enslave 782 people on six Louisiana cotton plantations making them the sixth largest enslavers in the U.S. 

• Henry Buck, born in Bucksport, Maine, and descended from one of the town’s founders, Jonathan Buck. He uses profits from his steam-sawmill and lumber businesses in coastal South Carolina to purchase a rice plantation shortly before the war. Three-hundred and twelve enslaved workers labor on his plantation.

At least one elite planter demands compensation from Union authorities for their wartime losses. Mary Sargent Duncan – granddaughter of Gloucester, Massachusetts-born Winthrop Sargent, the first Governor of the Mississippi Territory prior to statehood – writes letters of protest to President Abraham Lincoln and other government officials for their alleged failure to protect them and their property from Union troops (especially since she and her immediate family have been staunch Unionists before and during the war).

In her letter to Lincoln, Mary Sargent Duncan demands compensation – particularly [for] “the enormous loss of negroes – Millions would hardly cover our losses, consequently it is somewhat natural that [we] ask due protection for the fragment that remains of a once princely fortune.” (Italics in original.)  

In 1865 and 1866, Mississippi and Louisiana institute Black Codes that mirror the discriminatory and restrictive laws of colonial times for Black people and force many freedmen to continue to labor on plantations in conditions not far removed from slavery (see next timeline entry). 

Among the beneficiaries of the new measures is Mary Sargent Duncan, whose father-in-law is Stephen Duncan, the wealthiest cotton planter and the second-largest enslaver in the U.S. with over 2,200 slaves on 15 cotton and sugar plantations. He also holds major investments in railroads and lumber, and is a partner in a banking firm that is a precursor to JP Morgan, the investment and financial services giant.

1865-1866  Black Codes: Slavery by another name 

The defining feature of the post-Civil War Black Codes is a series of vagrancy laws intended to ensure a steady supply of cheap Black labor. Authorities can declare a Black person “a vagrant” if he or she cannot show proof of employment and permanent residence – which is the case for thousands of newly emancipated African Americans in the chaotic aftermath of the war. (A Mississippi Black Code law only allows Black people to rent land within cities, effectively preventing them from earning money through independent farming.) A “vagrant” can be arrested, fined, and bound out for a term of labor if unable to pay the fine. Apprentice laws provide for the "hiring out" of orphans and other young Black dependents to Whites, who often turn out to be their former “owners.” 

In some states, Black Codes limit the type of property Black people can own; in others, they are excluded from certain businesses or from the skilled trades. Formerly enslaved African Americans are forbidden to carry firearms or to testify in court, except in cases concerning other African Americans. They can legally marry, but interracial marriage is prohibited. 

Mississippi is the first state to pass new Black Codes after the war. And they serve as a model for those enacted by other states, beginning with South Carolina, Alabama, and Louisiana in 1865, and continuing with Florida, Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, Tennessee, and Arkansas at the beginning of 1866.  

By design, the Black Codes create incentives to arrest and imprison Black people and channel them into a system of convict leasing. Prisoners are kept in miserable conditions and supplied to local governments and planters as unpaid workers. (Technically, this does not violate the Thirteenth Amendment, which bans slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime.)

Convict leasing – in which the criminal justice system essentially colludes with private planters and other business owners to entrap, convict, and lease African Americans as prison laborers – proves extremely profitable for local governments and business-owners. It is widely used to supply unpaid labor to farming, railroad, mining, and logging operations throughout the South.

Conditions under convict leasing “were often as gruesome as anything that had existed under slavery,” explains historian Clint Smith in his book, How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America. He quotes the editor of The Daily Picayune, a newspaper in New Orleans, Louisiana, who writes in 1884 that it would be “more humane to punish with death” all the prisoners sentenced to convict leasing at the Louisiana State Penitentiary for six years or more, because the average such prisoner would not live more than six years anyway.

The convict leasing system provides states with a new and dependable source of revenue, generating income nearly four times the cost of prison administration. As a result, Southern states build no new prisons until the late 19th century and, despite growing opposition, most maintain convict leasing into the 20th century. Alabama is the last state to officially end the practice – in 1928 – but the system’s legacy continues today.  

A report published by the American Civil Liberties Union in June 2022 found that currently about 800,000 prisoners out of the 1.2 million in state and federal prisons are forced to work, generating a conservative estimate of $11 billion annually in goods and services while average wages range from 13 cents to 52 cents per hour. Five states – Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas – force prisoners to work without pay. The report concludes that the labor conditions of U.S. prisoners violate fundamental human rights to life and dignity.

In his book Slavery and the Penal System, criminologist Thorsten Sellin writes that the sole aim of convict leasing "was financial profit to the lessees who exploited the labor of the prisoners to the fullest, and to the government which sold the convicts to the lessees."

The Black Codes outrage public opinion in the North because it seems the South is creating a form of quasi-slavery to negate the results of the war. In response, the Republican-controlled Congress passes the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the first federal law to define citizenship and affirm equal protection under the law for all citizens. 

In 1867 and 1868, Congress passes four Military Reconstruction Acts that create five military districts in the former Confederate states and outline what those states must do to be readmitted to the Union (except for Tennessee, which had already been readmitted.) The requirements include drafting a new state constitution to be approved by Congress, and ratifying the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that guarantees full citizenship rights to all but Native Americans. 

1866  White mob kills voting rights advocates

Wielding clubs and guns, the White mob brutally attacks the Black marchers – many of whom are unarmed – on the street and in the Institute building where they seek refuge. “Some leaped from windows and were shot dead when they landed,” writes historian Ron Chernow in Grant, his biography of President Ulysses S. Grant. “Those lying wounded on the ground were stabbed repeatedly, their skulls bashed in with brickbats. The sadism was so wanton that men who kneeled and prayed for mercy were killed instantly, while dead bodies were stabbed and mutilated.” Federal troops suppress the riot and jail many of the White insurgents, and the city is placed under martial law for four days. 

The New Orleans Massacre follows another outburst of racial terror by Whites in Memphis, Tennessee two months earlier in which 46 Black people and two White people are killed. A rampaging mob – incited by some local White officials –  torches at least 89 Black homes, 12 Black schools, and four Black churches, and attacks and kills Black residents. Particular targets are the homes and wives of Black Union soldiers. 

The events in New Orleans and Memphis strengthen the case made by Radical Republicans in the U.S. Congress that more has to be done to protect freedmen in the Southern U.S. and grant them full rights as citizens. In the 1866 midterm elections, the Republican Party increases its majority, gaining 77% of the seats in Congress. This enables Republicans to overturn any veto by Democratic President Andrew Johnson, who is opposed to granting equal rights to freedmen. 

The events also influence the passage in 1868 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which grants full citizenship to all native born or naturalized individuals, including African Americans (but not including Native Americans), as well as the 1867-68 Reconstruction Acts. These laws establish military districts and oversight in certain formerly Confederate states, and outline the conditions under which such states would be readmitted to the Union.

1866  Wisconsin activists win voting rights campaign 

1866  Racism robs African Americans of land reform benefits

In the wake of the destruction and chaos of the Civil War, the SHA offers a potential lifeline to thousands of newly emancipated African Americans who are in desperate economic straits and eager to acquire and cultivate their own land for their own benefit and security. Relatively few have gained land during and immediately after the war in areas under the jurisdiction of the U.S. military; and almost all land allocated during the war is restored to its pre-war White owners.

In the first year of the SHA, unoccupied Southern land is offered exclusively to African Americans and loyal Whites. (After 1867, others can apply, even landless former Confederates.) But African Americans have to overcome a host of barriers to take advantage of the new opportunity: racist and unhelpful Southern bureaucrats; violence from competing Whites; the poor quality of the available land; no experience in dealing with government; and lack of cash or access to capital to invest. 

Perhaps the biggest hurdle, according to historian Keri Leigh Merritt, involves the year-long labor contracts many Black workers have been cajoled or forced into signing shortly after slavery is outlawed. Leaving a job before the end date of a contract frequently results in virtual re-enslavement on a chain gang. 

By the time the SHA is repealed in 1876, nearly 28,000 individuals have been awarded land. Combined with the claimants of the original Homestead Act, more than 1.6 million White families – both native-born and immigrant – succeed in becoming landowners during the next several decades. By contrast, only 4,000 to 5,500 African-American claimants ever receive final land patents from the SHA.

Merritt, author of Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, writes: “The Homestead Acts were unquestionably the most extensive, radical, redistributive governmental policy in U.S. history. The number of adult descendants of the original Homestead Act recipients living in the year 2000 was estimated to be around 46 million people, about a quarter of the U.S. adult population [Italics in original]. 

"If that many white Americans can trace their legacy of wealth and property ownership to a single entitlement program, then the perpetuation of black poverty must also be linked to national policy. Indeed, the Homestead Acts excluded African Americans not in letter, but in practice – a template that the government would propagate for the next century and a half.”

When the failure of land distribution among African Americans during the Reconstruction era is judged within the context of the Homestead Acts, says Merritt, “the reality of the situation is laid bare. The problem was never the radical nature of land reform. The problem was racism.”

She also notes that, although African Americans gained political rights soon after emancipation, those rights were limited for a people without capital or job prospects. “Land would have served as the primary source for reparations.”