Episode Details

In January 1865, twenty Black ministers sat down with General William Sherman and the Secretary of War and were asked what their people needed most. Their spokesman answered that they needed land. Four days later that answer became a written army order, and by that June roughly forty thousand freed people were living on about four hundred thousand acres of Georgia and Carolina coast.

Within the year a presidential pardon began handing that land back to the men who had owned it before the war. When the families on Edisto Island were told to leave, three of them wrote it down, and their letters survive.

Part 1 is the documented half, and it carries no speculation. Every figure in it sits on a peer-reviewed study or a primary record, and the sources are listed in full. Part 2 arrives this Friday and starts at the exact point where the record stops.

Sources include Thomas Craemer in Social Science Quarterly, the Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland, the New Georgia Encyclopedia, and the National Archives.