It revealed that enslaved men and women, if given the opportunity, would work without the lash and develop into responsible citizens. The experience at Port Royal shattered such assumptions.
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Indolence and ignorance, so the stereotype went, prohibited the African-American worker from being integrated into a free labor system. Both white Southerners and white Northerners except, of course, abolitionists, assumed servitude to be the enslaved person’s natural position. It was there, in Port Royal and the surrounding South Carolina Sea Islands, that African American slaves first tilled the soil as free laborers. The Port Royal Experiment was a humanitarian mission undergirded by economic necessity and military expediency. Well into the the post-war period it remained an exemplar of what might have been had Reconstruction not reversed its course and given way to the white supremacy of Southern home rule. Thus, the Port Royal Experiment’s status as a model for Reconstruction did not end with the Port Royal Experiment. The freed men and women of Port Royal also remained politically active until 1895, when South Carolina’s Constitutional Convention voted to disenfranchise African American voters. Men and women worked, children went to school, and local issues were resolved at the cornerstone of the community, the church. The effects of the Port Royal Experiment, combined with Port Royal’s isolation and large African American population, produced a black community that was largely self-sufficient and independent. It became clear that radical land distribution was not going to be part of Reconstruction and the Port Royal Experiment withered as reconstruction progressed. In the process lands sold outright at public auction remained in freed men and women’s hands but those land redistributed by possessory claim were restored to former owners whose title had not been extinguished by the possessory claims, provided they paid taxes and received a pardon.
However, following Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865 President Andrew Johnson began implementing his own reconstruction plan.
The land was redistributed to freed men and women in 40 acre plots held through a possessory claim. After completing his march through Georgia, Sherman issued an order in January 1865 confiscating all the land on the South Atlantic coastline from Charleston to Jacksonville, and thirty miles inland. The army also recruited a volunteer regiment of United States Colored Troops from Port Royal, the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, which served successfully in combat. While they focused on work as a primary objective, the Gideonites introduced a comprehensive program of adult education and literacy. For the Gideonites and the Federal government the Port Royal Experiment would be judged on whether prewar cotton yields obtained under the southern system of bondage could be obtained under the northern system of free labor. Friction among the army, cotton agents and Gideonites resulted from the differing objectives of each group. The militant zeal exhibited by these young abolitionists led to the derisive nickname, the Gideonites, given them by the army after the biblical Gideonites. Pierce brought a task force of northern abolitionist missionaries, educators and doctors to oversee the development of the community at Port Royal.
Pierce reported in February 1862 that the former slaves were willing to work as free men and women. Chase sent Abolitionist Edward Lillie Pierce to assess conditions at Port Royal. White planters abandoned their plantations which were taken over by freed slaves who began farming on self-surveyed plots. The Port Royal Experiment began when Union naval forces captured Port Royal and the surrounding South Carolina Sea Islands in November 1861.
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