During the war General Sherman had made Rufus Saxton “the inspector of settlements and plantations” for this reservation. By the time O. O. Howard made him an assistant commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau for the state of Georgia, he had become a champion of freedmen and a believer in the necessity of land redistribution. In August 1865 Saxton wrote that when the ex-slave “is made a landholder, he becomes practically an independent citizen, and a great step towards his future elevation had been made.”52 Like Saxton, Howard
