The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States)

by Richard White

Rufus Saxton of the Freedmen’s Bureau echoed this. The land would be payment for “two hundred years of unrequited toil.” Many of the four million freedpeople believed the land would be given them at Christmas of 1865 or in 1866.