There’s a transcript of this meeting, and it shows that these two men, Stanton and Sherman, actually turned to this group of black leaders and asked them, what do you want for your own people? He has Sherman pull together a meeting with 20 black church leaders. When word gets back to Lincoln’s secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, he is outraged. Others are trampled or shot to death, and those who remain are captured and re-enslaved. Some of them drown trying to swim across. But the Confederate Army is on their heels, and once the Union troops cross, they break up the bridge, leaving all those people who had just escaped slavery behind to face either the icy waters or the rebel army that was in pursuit. So the troops start building one, and they instruct the black people who are following them to just wait, that the troops need to cross first, but then they’ll be able to come after. They are people of all ages, young and old, who need food and care, and they are slowing the troops down.īy December of that year, some of Sherman’s troops are about to approach Savannah, and they come upon a creek that is both too wide and too deep to cross without a bridge. Sherman didn’t actually oppose slavery, and so he’s really not that sympathetic to those who are fleeing these plantations, and he also sees them as a drain on his resources. In the fall of 1864 at the height of the Civil War, one of the most famous Union generals, William Tecumseh Sherman, begins his march out of the city of Atlanta to the sea.Īnd as Sherman and his men make their way through Georgia, black Southerners are seeing an opportunity.Īnd so by the thousands, they start to leave the plantations where they’ve been enslaved and are falling behind Sherman’s troops as they make their way to the coast.īut these newly liberated people were not exactly welcomed. įrom The New York Times Magazine, I’m Nikole Hannah-Jones. What would you say to it now? june provost Like, why are you talking to dirt? But it’s just like, the love that you have for the land is just - I mean, it’s unreal. Oh, I know they miss me, because I used to talk to them all the time. I can’t say enough how I miss this, I mean - annie brownĭo you think the fields miss you? june provost That was my, you know - just, that was mine. That was like, I would wake up and just so pumped, ready to go to the shop and start repairing wagons. I mean, y’all don’t realize how depressed I get when I see people getting ready to plant cane, because that was my time of the year. You know, to turn over that dirt and to watch this thing from a few inches to grow into almost a 12-foot stalk is just - it’s amazing. There’s not a better sound, to hear that sugar cane move. Yeah, just be careful, because it will kind of slice you. Transcript Episode 5: The Land of Our Fathers, Part 1 Hosted by Nikole Hannah-Jones, produced by Annie Brown, Adizah Eghan and Kelly Prime, with help from Austin Mitchell, and edited by Larissa Anderson, Lisa Chow, Lisa Tobin and Wendy Dorr More than a century and a half after the promise of 40 acres and a mule, the story of black land ownership in America remains one of loss and dispossession.