As Lincoln was struggling to come up with a plan for how to discipline the unpatriotic white Southerners, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and General William Sherman met with twenty Black ministers in Savannah, Georgia, to discuss the fate of the emancipated Americans. The main spokesperson, sixty-seven-year-old Garrison Frazier, had one request: “To have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor.”9 Of the twenty Black leaders, all but one confessed that their deepest desire was to live separate from whites.
