Near Hilton Head, South Carolina, a former Treasury agent named Albert Browne heard of the young black boy who’d been ambushed by a pardoned Confederate soldier who shot him fifty-seven times, mostly in the face and head. “What most men mean to-day by the ‘president’s plan of reconstruction’ is the pardon of every rebel for the crime of rebellion, and the utter refusal to pardon a single black loyalist for the ‘crime’ of being black,” Thomas Wentworth Higginson tersely observed.
