January 12, 2025

On this date 160 years ago, in the home of Charles Green on Madison Square, 20 leaders from Savannah’s Christian African-American community met with U.S. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and General William T. Sherman. At Stanton’s behest, Sherman had sent invitations to the then 5 Black churches in Savannah for their representatives to meet with the secretary. 

As Stanton noted after the meeting and W. W. Law, Savannah's most prominent civil rights leader, likewise pointed out many years later, it was the first time in the country’s history that Black Americans were asked by the government (and one of its highest officials at that) how they could take care of themselves. “We want to be placed on land until we can buy it and make it our own,” Garrison Frazier, a retired elder statesm​an of the group and chairman of the Savannah Educational Association, responded. As a result, Sherman issued Special Field Orders, Number 15 four days later. And on March 3, 1865--less than two months after the meeting-- Congress passed and Abraham Lincoln signed into law on the same day the Freedmen’s Bureau Act. Section 4 of that law is based on Sherman’s field order. 

Meanwhile, Stanton had appointed General Rufus Saxton to implement the plan. On February 3, 1865, Saxton gave a speech at Second African Baptist Church on Greene Square detailing the field order. Within the next two months after the speech, 40,000 freed people had already settled on former plantations on the Southeast coast. But Lincoln’s unfortunate choice of replacing his original vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, with Andrew Johnson, and his even more unfortunate assassination in April 1865 signaled the beginning of the end of the land redistribution plan popularly know as “40 Acres and a Mule.” 

Yet we should remember what a triumph that meeting was! Stanton, no pushover, told someone after the meeting, “The ministers understand these issues as well as any member of President Lincoln’s cabinet.” 

The meeting was a culmination of a series of events that began in the 1770s when the independent Black church was first constituted in Savannah. For 90 years the congregations prayed for freedom and fervently sang about it—“Children We All Shall Be Free” being a favored spiritual—and, not only that, they planned for the day that they truly would be free. 

So when that day arrived on December 21st, 1864, they were ready. First, by immediately establishing the Savannah Educational Association for the Black children’s initial public school system and then, when called to a meeting at a moment’s notice and no idea what they were going to be ask​ed, laying out the foundation of how Black Americans could achieve racial equity. Let us not let this momentous event slip away from our memory.