After the Civil War, the United States was torn on how to provide services to freed slaves, or freedmen. Eventually the Freedmen’s Bureau emerged from the confusion. This bureau gave food, shelter, and education to freedmen, but also did one more very important service. The Freedmen’s Bureau helped to get the emancipated slaves on their feet by providing land to each of them. “Forty acres and a mule”(Abbot, 52) was the amount of land and property that each family or single man in South Carolina was to get. To freedmen, freedom was only achieved when they were in control of some type of property. Unfortunately, three problem arose; the government needed to attain a sufficient amount of land to provide the expected forty acres, distribute that land properly, and later fight the original owners for that land. There were four ways that the Freedmen’s Bureau acquired land in South Carolina. Three were due to Federal laws. First the federal government issued a direct tax law, and all who could not pay forfeited their property to the United States. Second, “All property of civil and military officers of the Confederate government [was] subject to seizure by the federal government” (Abbot, 53). Third, any Southerners who were not in their homes were considered voluntarily absent and gave their land to the United States. “All the properties in the South seized under these measures and still remaining under federal control at war’s end were turned over to the Bureau during the spring and summer of 1865” (Abbot, 53). Finally, during Sherman’s March of the Civil War, all islands South of Charleston an all abandoned rice fields were captured. These four measures of acquiring land accounted for about 300,000 acres of land that was in the possession of the Bureau, but they still did not know how they were going to pass it out.A decision was made that with this newly...
