An Ex-Slave Protests Eviction from "the Promised Land"
In the speech below, Bayley Wyat, an ex-slave, protests the eviction of blacks from confiscated plantations in Virginia in 1866. Like so many other nineteenth-century Americans, white and black, freed people wanted to work the land as [...]
A Southern Planter Argues that "the Negro Will Not Work"
After the Civil War Confederate leaders and planters argued that their lands, taken (confiscated) by the Union army or abandoned during the war, should be returned to them. Those who wanted freedmen to take over and farm the lands pointed to the [...]
Thaddeus Stevens Calls for Redistribution of Confederate Land
On January 6, 1865, General William T. Sherman issued Special Field Order #15, which gave millions of acres of land along the Atlantic coast to emancipated slaves, in lots of not more than 40 acres per family. In March 1865, Representative Thaddeus [...]
An Ex-Slave Protests Eviction from 'the Promised Land' (short)
In the last months of the Civil War, General William T. Sherman of the Union Army issued Special Field Order Number 15, which set aside more than 400,000 acres of abandoned coastal plantations from South Carolina to Florida for settlement [...]