Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

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Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867
United States officers, but planters in disguise,” trying “to cajole them into ‘signing
away their freedom.’” 56
Some observers attributed the freedpeople’s faith in imminent land redistribution
to tales spread by black soldiers, but Soule blamed “Sherman’s men,” who
had traversed the Carolinas early in the year. When white officers brought different
news, he wrote, black residents refused to believe “so unpalatable an announcement,”
so the regiment sent parties of “intelligent and judicious” enlisted
men instead to set up camps, transmit information, and preserve order throughout
the Orangeburg District. “The system worked much better than anticipated,” Soule
told Howard. By November, the 35th USCI had fifteen enlisted men “visiting plantations”
more than ninety miles east of Orangeburg, the commanding officer wrote.
The squad reported to regimental headquarters at Georgetown on Saturdays, received
instructions for the coming week, and set off again on its rounds. 57
Sherman’s soldiers could not have been solely responsible for the idea of a
massive redistribution of farmland, of course. The belief was widespread across
the South. A more plausible source was the conversation of slaveholders themselves,
as they urged each other to greater wartime effort with assertions that Yankee
abolitionists were hell-bent on freeing their slaves and dividing the plantations
among them. Overhearing a rant like this, house servants carried the news to the
slave quarters, where it gained wide circulation. This was the explanation that General
Saxton, who had longer experience with freedpeople than anyone in the Army,
offered to General Howard. 58
Desire for land ownership was universal among rural black Southerners. “They
ask ‘what is the value of freedom if one has nothing to go on?’ That is to say, if
property in some shape or other is not to be given us, we might as well be slaves,”
Chaplain Thomas Smith of the 53d USCI reported from Jackson, Mississippi.
“Nearly all of them have heard, that at Christmas, Government is going to take the
planters’ lands and other property . . . and give it to the colored people,” the chaplain
continued. As a result, few freedmen were willing to sign a labor contract for
the coming year. The South Carolina Sea Islands formed part of the coastal tract
that General Sherman had reserved for black settlement in January 1865. Nearly
a year later, white landowners with presidential pardons were returning to reclaim
their plantations. “The [freedmen] are exceedingly anxious to buy or lease land,
rather than to hire themselves to their former owners. They . . . will gladly pay any
56 Capt C. C. Soule to Maj Gen O. O. Howard, [8 Sep 1865], NA M752, roll 17; Johnson Papers,
7: 251 (“loyal, industrious”); Hahn et al., Land and Labor, pp. 814–16, 856; Eugene D. Genovese,
Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), pp. 588–89,
592–96. The 35th USCI detailed three officers as a “Special Commission for Making Contracts.”
35th USCI, SO 40, 20 Jun 1865, 35th USCI, Regimental Books, RG 94, NA.
57 Soule to Howard, [8 Sep 1865]. General Howard’s brother also thought the freedmen’s ideas
of land redistribution came from Sherman’s army. Brig Gen C. H. Howard to Maj Gen R. Saxton, 17
Nov 1865, and Maj A. J. Willard to Maj W. H. Smith, 13 Nov 1865 (quotation), both in NA M869,
roll 34; Maj A. J. Willard to Capt G. W. Hooker, 19 Nov 1865, Entry 4112, pt. 1, RG 393, NA; Hahn
et al., Land and Labor, p. 381; Foner, Reconstruction, p. 68.
58 Maj Gen R. Saxton to Maj Gen O. O. Howard, 6 Dec 1865, NA M752, roll 24. A letter from
Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton assigned Saxton to manage plantations on the South Carolina
Sea Islands in April 1862. OR, ser. 3, 2: 27–28. See also Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet:
Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 130–31.