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Forty acres and a mule
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====Port Royal Experiment==== The collective was established and became known as the [[Port Royal Experiment]]: a possible model for black economic activity after slavery. The Experiment attracted support from Northerners like economist [[Edward Atkinson (activist)|Edward Atkinson]], who hoped to prove his theory that free labor would be more productive than slave labor.<ref>{{harvnb|Rose|1964|pp=37β38}}</ref> More traditional abolitionists like [[Maria Weston Chapman]] also praised Pierce's plan. Civic groups like the [[American Missionary Association]] provided enthusiastic assistance.<ref>{{harvnb|Rose|1964|p=40}}</ref> These sympathetic Northerners quickly recruited a boatload (53 chosen from a pool of applicants several times larger) of Ivy League and divinity school graduates who set off for Port Royal on March 3, 1862.<ref>{{harvnb|Rose|1964|pp=43β44}}</ref> The residents of Port Royal generally resented the military and civilian occupiers, who exhibited racist superiority in varying degrees of overtness.<ref>{{harvnb|Rose|1964|pp=64β66, 159β160}}</ref> Joy turned to sorrow when, on May 12 Union soldiers arrived to draft all able-bodied black men previously liberated on April 13, 1862, by General [[David Hunter]] who proclaimed slavery abolished in Georgia, South Carolina, and Alabama.<ref>{{harvnb|Rose|1964|pp=144β146}}</ref> Hunter kept his regiment even after Lincoln reversed this tri-state emancipation proclamation; but disbanded almost all of it when unable to draw payroll from the War Department.<ref>{{harvnb|Rose|1964|p=189}}</ref> Black farmers preferred to grow vegetables and catch fish, whereas the missionaries (and other whites on the islands) encouraged [[King Cotton|monoculture of cotton]] as a [[cash crop]].<ref>{{harvnb|Rose|1964|p=226}}</ref> In the thinking of the latter, civilization would be advanced by incorporating blacks into the consumer economy dominated by Northern manufacturing.<ref>{{harvnb|Rose|1964|pp=226β228}}. "It is this exclusive preoccupation with cotton that has given most support to the idea that the planter-missionaries were pure economic imperialists [...]. Their vision of the freed people as agricultural peasants devoted to a single-crop economy and educated to a taste for consumer goods supplied by Northern factories fulfils the classic pattern of tributary economics the world over. It is important to remember that at this early time there seemed nothing conspiratorial about this."</ref> Meanwhile, various conflicts arose among the missionaries, the Army, and the merchants whom Chase and Reynolds had invited to Port Royal in order to confiscate all that could be sold.<ref>{{harvnb|Rose|1964|pp=66β67}}</ref> On balance, however, the white sponsors of the Experiment had perceived positive results; businessman [[John Murray Forbes]] in May 1862 called it "a decided success", announcing that Blacks would indeed work in exchange for wages.<ref>{{harvnb|Rose|1964|p=141}}</ref> Secretary of War [[Edwin M. Stanton]] appointed General [[Rufus Saxton]] as military governor of Port Royal in April 1862, and by December Saxton was agitating for permanent black control over the land. He won support from Stanton, Chase, Sumner, and President Lincoln, but met continuing resistance from a tax commission that wanted to sell the land.<ref>{{harvnb|Cox|1958|p=428}}</ref> Saxton also received approval to train a black militia, which formally became the [[1st South Carolina Volunteers (Union)|1st South Carolina Volunteers]] on January 1, 1863, when the [[Emancipation Proclamation]] legalized its existence.<ref>{{harvnb|Rose|1964|pp=191β194}}</ref>
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