The first experiment in “re-organization” began in November 1861, when the U.S. Navy took control of the Sea Islands, a group of islands and tidal barriers off the coast of South Carolina. As soon as Union troops reached shore, white southerners fled to the mainland while nearly ten thousand enslaved people remained on the islands’ vast cotton plantations. Salmon Chase, now the secretary of the treasury, took charge. He affirmed that these ten thousand enslaved men and women, “confiscated” by the Union Army, were free. At the same time, he wanted the new freedpeople to keep picking cotton, a
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