History of the United States I / Unit 16 USH1 2296 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
The Land That Was Not Given
The idea
On the Sea Islands off South Carolina formerly enslaved people expected to own land, after Sherman directed that freed people receive forty-acre plots. In eighteen sixty-five Johnson ordered the land returned to its White owners, and ultimately no land redistribution occurred. Freedom meant wage labour rather than economic independence. Without money or implements, freed people relied on the crop-lien system, in which store owners extended credit at high interest against a portion of the future harvest.
In practice
Sharecroppers renting land, often on the plantations where they had been enslaved, and paying in crops, often as much as half their harvest.
Where people slip
The forty acres and the order rescinding them belong in the same entry. The decision that most determined the next century of Black southern poverty was not a failure to act. It was an act, and it was Johnson's order of eighteen sixty-five returning the land. Year-to-year leases then removed any incentive to improve the land, and interest drained the rest.
Your place on the trail
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