By Scott Graber
It is Sunday, early, and I’m in our dining room staring into the darkness.
This morning I’ve got the New York Times and a review of “Somewhere Toward Freedom — Sherman’s March and the Story of America’s Largest Emancipation” by Bennett Parten (Simon and Schuster, 253 pages, $29.99).
Parten has written yet another account of Sherman’s march through Georgia. However, Parten’s book is focused on the 17,000 newly-freed slaves that followed Sherman’s rag-tag army as it battled, burned and looted its way from Atlanta to Savannah in 1864.
Apparently Sherman was annoyed with these “camp followers,” did not allow them to enter Savannah, then put them in barges and sent them to “Port Royal” where they were “housed in rough tents, or they slept outdoors, often without blankets. At least 1,000 of them died of exposure.”
I am not certain about this, however, I think many of these refugees were camped at Camp Saxton, now the U.S. Naval Hospital, where I suspect they were jubilant but worried about what would happen next.
Sherman then decided that they should be “settled” in a 30 mile-wide strip of land, commencing in Charleston and running down the coast to Jacksonville. The problem was that Sherman was soon off to Columbia and Fayetteville, N.C., and did not “own” that 30-mile-wide stretch. Although he was beating up on the Confederates whereever he found them, he didn’t “control” that much rebel real estate.
But this issue of resettlement had been simmering since 1862 when runaway slaves first fled into “Port Royal” — then a small captured outpost on the Atlantic.
During its occupation various persons in the Federal government came up with the idea of a tax sale that would detach the local cotton-growing plantations on St. Helena and Port Royal islands from their departed Confederate owners to the benefit of (at least some) of the freedman.
And so there were a series of sales, and years later I would go up to the National Archives (in Washington) and actually examine the “Head of Family Certificates” that were issued to the successful Black bidders.
Northern businessmen also got in on the tax sales — Edward Philbrick bought-up 11 plantations in the belief that the “freedmen” would now, happily, work the land for wages.
But by 1864 — lingering in the smoke-filled air at Camp Saxton — was the idea that there was going to be a much larger land transfer, across the South, where the former slaves would acquire most or all of the cotton-growing plantations.
In Washington, D.C.. Thaddeus Stevens, a member of the House of Representatives, envisioned a massive transfer of property (to the ex-slaves) that would destroy or debilitate the Southern aristocracy and would become the means of empowering the entire Black race.
And for a while it looked like this redistribution of wealth might happen — that there would be, in effect, reparations for the sin of slavery. But President Andrew Johnson was not on board. He believed that the Civil War was fought over the issue of slavery; and now that slavery was ended the former Confederate plantation owners could come back and keep (and farm) their real estate.
But in Beaufort the question of the tax sales lingered.
“The incessant litigation over the status of the Direct Tax lands troubled Negroes and white alike. Throughout the Reconstruction period the dispossessed whites worked under the leadership of Richard DeTreville to break the tax laws under which their estates had been effected. Using the house in Beaufort [in] which Robert Smalls had been reared as a slave and which the Negro leader had bought at the government tax sales, DeTreville fought the case through the state courts and lost. When the claim on the Prince Street house came into the possession of William DeTreville upon the death of Richard DeTreville, the case at last, in 1878, reached the Supreme Court, where it was defeated. The freedman and Northerners who had benefitted from the tax sales retained their land, and Port Royal became, in respect to landownership, very much what the Gideonites had hoped it would become,” wrote Willie Lee Rose in her 1964 book, “Rehearsal for Reconstruction.”
“As years passed,” Rose continued, “the animosities of war cooled, at least as far as the victors were concerned. In Beaufort County nothing demonstrated the mellowing attitude better than the growing sense that the local Southern white people had, in the loss of their property, suffered an unfair amount of punishment.”
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
