from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” (Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy [New York: The Modern Library, 1906], 834.)
63 “John H. Kennaway, 1865,” in Standing upon the Mouth of a Volcano: New South Georgia, A Documentary History, ed. Mills Lane (Savannah: Beehive Press, 1993), 3.
64 Eric Foner, Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007), 78.
Ogeechee Till Death:
Expropriation and Communization in Low-Country Georgia
“You ask us to forgive the landowners of our island.… I cannot well forgive. Does it look as if he has forgiven me, seeing how he tries to keep me in a condition of helplessness?”
—Anonymous former slave from Edisto Island, South Carolina, October 1865
“As to work, I do not imagine they will do much of it.”
—Charles Heyward,
a Combahee River, South Carolina planter, 1867
On the eve of 1868, while prominent Savannah citizens delighted in Christmas and New Year’s festivities, another party was brewing in the swamps and rice fields of the Ogeechee Neck just twelve miles south of the city. Hundreds of rice workers and forest squatters were driving the plantation overseers off their lands, and concretizing their plans to occupy the land and create new lives for themselves, independent of the newly imposed rent and wage system.
In November of 1864, Sherman’s troops took Atlanta and destroyed the entire railroad infrastructure in the city. They would return again, under different names, after the war to rebuild the railroads and the city but with northern, industrial investment and profit replacing the southern planter oligarchy.
The Ogeechee Insurrection would last only a few weeks, but its legacy lives on as the most coordinated series of occupations of the coastal southeast rice plantations. While rice workers all over South Carolina and Georgia were striking intermittently, the Ogeechee rebels went beyond work stoppages and transformed their lives by claiming the land that their ancestors had been forced to turn into rice fields. With arms and manifestos, the insurgents fought in the footsteps of the maroons before them and attempted to destroy the plantation system forever.
Land Contestation after the War
At the end of the war, many Black workers chose not to leave the plantations, homesteads, and cities where they were enslaved. The story usually goes that this was because they were isolated from survival networks away from their homes; however, many slaves had already freed themselves at home and did not need to leave to find sanctuary. The Emancipation Proclamation, which officially freed the slaves, was a militarily strategic move that legalized the incorporation of fugitive and contraband slaves into the ranks of the Union Army, while crippling the South’s productive capacity during the war.65 In effect, the Proclamation was symbolic; slaves had already been freeing themselves by the thousands, not to officially join a war they were already fighting on their own terms, but because “they wanted to stop the economy of the plantation system, and to do that they left the plantations.”66
For many slaves who had been trying to rid the South of the planter class for decades, the presence of an invading army complicated their efforts at freedom. To begin to catalog the attacks on plantation society in the South from 1861 to 1865 would be impossible because they were occurring everywhere and all the time. Refusal continued as it had for generations: in the various forms of sabotage, strikes, insubordination, individual acts of violence, conspiracy, and revolt.67 By 1861, to counter this rebellion, the entire South became one huge mobilized military camp, the effects of which perfected the systems of policing already created for slave labor.68
This engraving depicts the burning of a railroad depot, potentially in Atlanta, by Sherman’s troops in the fall of 1864. Below the flames, fugitives and refugees—symbolized by their carried belongings—are seen in the wake of Sherman’s army, representing the thousands that followed behind the advance of Sherman’s troops to Savannah.
In the pre–Civil War era, slavery resisters made constant and diverse attacks against cash crop production to interrupt the flow of profit and to gain autonomy. With the war winding down, the introduction of federal troops, and the planters’ attempt to return to the land, there was a distinct turn toward generalized expropriation and destruction by former rice and cotton workers in order to force the end of the system of plantation labor, prevent planters from recovering the wealth stored in their properties, and resist assimilation into wage slavery. These actions speak to the desires of the saboteurs, those who refused to forgive and forget their exploitation and who did not wait for Union bureaucrats to settle matters between the planters and themselves.
More than in any other part of the South, the accumulated resentments of slavery burst forth in violence. In Georgetown, plantation homes and meat houses were pillaged by the freedmen. Chicora Wood,69 the home plantation of Robert W. Allston before his death in 1864, was ransacked by his slaves—every article of furniture was removed and his meticulous plantation records destroyed.… On another Georgetown plantation, Blacks “divided out the land and … pulled down fences and would obey no driver.” Farther to the south, the magnificent plantation home at Middleton Place near Charleston was burned to the ground and the vaults in the family graveyard were broken open and the bones scattered by the slaves, including some who had escaped to enlist in the Union Army and who now returned with General Sherman to wreak vengeance.70
Surrounded by bands of refugees, fugitives, and guerilla soldiers, and with more showing up each day, Sherman couldn’t leave Savannah until he made an attempt to address this impending crisis. Chiefly concerned with the fact that they were all unemployed, the Secretary of War General Edwin Stanton came in from Washington immediately to investigate the matter and work with Sherman toward a solution. After a few days of “examining the condition of the liberated Negroes,” Stanton chose twenty men whom he determined were fit to be leaders, whose backgrounds ranged from barbers and ministers to former overseers, and sat them down with Sherman to discuss a plan of action.71
From there, General Sherman issued the infamous “Sea Island Circular” of January 18, 1865, also known as the “Special Field Orders, No. 15,” which ordered the redistribution of all abandoned and confiscated lands from Charleston, South Carolina, to St. John’s River, Florida, including the Sea Islands and coastal waterways thirty miles inland. In effect, the majority of the South’s coastal rice and cotton plantations were to be divided into lots to be leased or sold to their former workers. Having no presidential or congressional authorization for this wartime act, Sherman appointed General Rufus Saxton, who became an abolitionist before the war, to deal with the details. Saxton would go on to direct the divisions of the Freedmen’s Bureau in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida when they were established in March 1865.72
Charged with managing this process of redistribution and political transition, many contemporary historians consider the leaders of the Freedmen’s Bureau to have been well-intentioned victims of their own bureaucracy. Regardless of individual Union officials’ sentiments toward racial harmony, however, it is clear that the larger function of the Freedmen’s Bureau and its policies was the smooth transition from one kind of class society to another, normalizing modern notions of landownership, contractual labor, and alienation.
