In July 1866, Congress agreed to reauthorize the Freedmen’s Bureau while stipulating that all the confiscated lands would be returned to the original owners. For nearly two years, Black people in South Carolina’s Lowcountry actually owned the land on which they had been enslaved. On James Island, America’s slave capital, most of the land had been redistributed to the former slaves before it was taken away. But now these freedmen were surrounded by angry Confederates whose land had been taken by Black repo men. And in those two years, they had all tasted Black power.
