At 8 p.m. on Thursday, 12 January 1865, General William T. Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton met twenty Black ministers and church officers at Sherman's headquarters in the Green-Meldrim House on Madison Square. Sherman's army had taken Savannah on 21 December 1864, followed by thousands of people who had left the plantations along its march. The twenty chose Garrison Frazier, a 67-year-old Baptist minister who had bought freedom for himself and his wife eight years earlier, to speak for them; he had been pastor of the Third African Baptist Church from 1851. Asked how freed people could best take care of themselves, he answered that the way was to have land, and to turn it and till it by their own labour.
Frazier said that, given the prejudice in the South, he would prefer freed people to live by themselves, and when the others were asked one by one, all but James Lynch, at 26 the youngest, agreed. In Sherman's absence the group was also asked how Black Savannah regarded the general. The minutes ran in the New-York Daily Tribune on 13 February 1865.
On 16 January Sherman issued Special Field Orders No. 15, setting apart the islands from Charleston south, the abandoned rice fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country along Florida's St. Johns River for freed families, in plots of no more than 40 acres. About 40,000 people had been settled by June 1865, before President Andrew Johnson's pardons returned most of the land to its former owners.
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