The shocking discovery that suddenly made reparations deeply personal for one woman – Mother Jones

40 Acres and a Lie tells the story of an often misunderstood government program that granted land titles to former slaves, only to take the land back. Learn more here and listen to a three-part audio investigation here.

Ruth Wilson narrowed her eyes through his eyebrow glasses, like a smudged and crumpled document on the computer screen.

“To all concerned,” it read. “Fergus Wilson having selected 40 acres of land on Sapelo Island, Georgia, pursuant to Special Land Ordinances, No. 15… has permission to hold and occupy said tract…”

The 71-year-old retired high school counselor let out a deep exhale as she leaned back on the leather couch in her living room, her dog Luckie looking up from his cushion by the fireplace. “Sometimes things aren’t worth the paper they’re written on,” she remarked. “They took it back.”

The document was one of 143 land titles contained in the recently digitized archives of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the federal agency responsible, among other things, for distributing land to those who had been emancipated from slavery. These titles detail specific black men and women who received land parcels in Georgia and South Carolina and empowered the Center for Public Integrity to lead the first-ever effort to identify and locate the living descendants of those whose lands were despoiled while reconstruction failed. To date, journalists have traced the genealogy of about 100 of the 1,250 people identified as having received land as a result of the orders. While many of their descendants remained in Georgia and South Carolina, others emigrated to states like Delaware, Michigan, and Ohio.

Among the land titles was the crumbling scrap of paper – with smeared ink, torn edges and three deep creases suggesting it had been folded into a small square – which in 1865 granted the great-great -Wilson’s grandfather, Fergus Wilson, his 40-acre land.

When a University of South Carolina English professor, Michele Reese, first contacted Ruth Wilson and told her that one of her ancestors had received land from the Freedmen’s Bureau, she had a hard time. hard to believe. For her, 40 acres and a mule had always evoked just one empty, unfulfilled promise in a long series.

“In the black community,” she explains, “we don’t say it, but we understand that we don’t project the white man for nothing. »

Fergus Wilson had was enslaved by Charles Spalding, whose family owned a sugarcane and cotton empire on Sapelo Island, Georgia. As the largest landowners on the island, the Spalding family enslaved 385 people there. In 1861, they sold Wilson to the president of a railroad company and he was sent to a railroad hospital in Savannah. In court papers he would file years later, Wilson said he and his wife, Priscilla, would offer food baskets to Union prisoners on wagons during the war. “I would rather suffer death than see them open their mouths and have us not fill them,” Wilson wrote, before adding that Union troops then stole all the crops from his garden.

“He had a large quantity of rice, but I don’t know how much. I don’t know how to count, but my old man, he knows how to count,” Priscilla would testify years later. “I saw them take the rice in bags, they carried it on their shoulders. It was good clean rice.

Under General William T. Sherman’s Special Orders No. 15, formerly enslaved men and women were entitled to up to 40 acres. For his land, Wilson chose land south of Savannah on Sapelo Island, on a rice plantation previously owned by the Spaldings. The eldest of his five sons, Fergus Jr. and Richard, also received title deeds to 40 acres each on Sapelo Island.

But once the war ended, the Spaldings fought to get their land back. Charles Spalding, who served as a lieutenant colonel in the Confederate Army, pledged allegiance to the Union and requested a presidential pardon in December 1865.

A month later, an administrator for his deceased brother Randolph’s estate asked the Freedmen’s Bureau to return the Spalding plantation to their family so they could repay their creditors. His widow and their children had all taken the oath of amnesty, according to a letter sent to county officials, and needed those 7,400 acres to pay the family’s debts.

President Andrew Johnson quickly pardoned Charles Thomas Spalding, allowing him to take over the Sapelo Island plantation as his own. While the Freedmen’s Bureau resisted returning land to Confederate planters like Spalding, by 1867 the plantation had been returned to them and Wilson’s land title had become worthless. Wilson’s sons, Fergus Jr. and Richard, would eventually leave Sapelo Island and move to Savannah after also losing their 40 acres.

Instead of returning to Savannah, Wilson pooled his money with other freedmen to purchase farmland in Camden County, near the coastal border with Florida, according to a study led by Professor Reese of the University of South Carolina. They paid half of it up front, $300, to a Freedmen’s Bureau agent, then repaid the rest after selling their first crop.

Before he died in 1873, at about age 70, Wilson successfully petitioned the Southern Claims Commission for half of the $492 he had requested in restitution for the crops and rice that Sherman’s soldiers had stolen from him. Years after Fergus’ death, his sons Hercules and Anthony Wilson would serve in the Georgia General Assembly.

“Of the three colored members of the House, two are brothers. They are Hercules Wilson, of McIntosh, and Anthony Wilson, of Camden,” relayed an October 1885 article in the Savannah Morning News. “Wilson, of McIntosh, is a mason, and Wilson, of Camden, is a farmer and teacher,” the report continues. “All are well-off, hard-working and sober. They board together at a private house on Peters Street.

That year, Hercules Wilson proposed a civil rights bill that would have banned racial discrimination in private businesses such as hotels and theaters, earning him a rebuke from the most widely read columnist from South. “I see the colored congressman from Camden has introduced a bill to enforce perfect equality of the races,” columnist Bill Arp wrote on the front page. Atlanta Constitution in which he implored state legislators not to be like others before them who had “given in to the prejudices of the North” and “were afraid to do anything lest the North be offended.”

“Our legislators will take on Camden & Co. Our people have as much good manners and as much humanity as any other people and know how to treat the negro according to their desires,” Arp continued. “We intend to make distinctions. The Creator created them and drew the color line and we will not try to erase it… If the wards are not satisfied, let them go elsewhere and find another guardian.

By November 1885, Hercules Wilson had resigned, pointing out that he was paid better as a mason than as a legislator. It would be more than a century before Georgian public places were desegregated.

“If anything was needed to show the inferiority of the colored race, it is in the person of Hercule Wilson,” declared the Transcript of the Boston evening. “If he had been a white man, he would have joined the third house of the Legislature. But the poor guy preferred to lay bricks for 4 or 5 dollars a day!

Her great-granddaughter Ruth Wilson has only been to Georgia once: as a child, she was taken to a wedding in Savannah. She spent her entire life in North Carolina, where her grandfather, Hercules Wilson Jr., born in 1882, moved to attend seminary, becoming the first in the family to receive a higher education. “My grandfather left Georgia,” she said. “And no, he didn’t come back.”

She grew up knowing relatively little about family in Georgia. His grandfather told him that his father had been a state legislator, but beyond that they never discussed slavery and Reconstruction. Hercules Wilson Jr. married and began pastoring a series of churches near Charlotte. He was proud that his three children were pursuing their university education. He loved reading the classics, Ruth recalled, and watching his family members dance. As a teenager, he got his family kicked out of a Baptist congregation by dancing at a church picnic. The Wilsons have been Presbyterians ever since.

Ruth grew up in Henderson, North Carolina, the only daughter of Hercules’ son, James, and his wife, Mary, who were both teachers. She still remembers her parents, after a trip to Winston Salem, who brought her the first black doll she ever saw (one she still owns today) and a white-owned drugstore where a young white girl was allowed to sit at the counter. counter to eat ice cream but she wasn’t. “If you grow up in this country, no one has to talk to you about skin color,” Ruth said. “It comes naturally.” She attended primary and secondary school amid the tumultuous integration efforts that followed the Supreme Court decision. Brown v. School Board decision before enrolling in a private high school and then at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

It was only in recent years, after she began using Ancestry.com to trace her genealogy, that she first heard the name Fergus Wilson and learned that he had been given 40 acres and then given to her withdraw.

“There is nothing like manna from heaven. And if it is given to us, beware: what is given can be taken away,” Wilson said. “And the good news about (Fergus), he was smart enough to have a plan B.”

This project is a collaboration between the Center for Public Integrity, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and the Investigative Reporting Workshop. Learn more here.

Top illustration: Michael Johnson: Source images: Courtesy of Ruth Wilson; Federico Respini/Unsplash; National Archives; Freedmen’s Bureau Records