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355 I don’t expect I will to live to see it, but when this generation has passed away, there will be a grand change. This colored people is going to be a people. Do you think God has had them robbed and scourged all the days of their lives for nothing? — sojourner truth (1879) chapter 19 “I Am on My Way to Kansas” I Sojourner witnessed the same heart breaking Washington scenes in 1870 she had left in 1867: “able men and women taking dry bread from the government to keep from starving.” This, she told a New York Tribune reporter, inspired her cause of getting land for her people. They should go out West, “where the land is so plenty,” and work for themselves. Back at her former Capitol Street residence, she found Josephine Griffing frail and unwell but hard at work. Freed people still crowded inside to receive cast-off “hats, coats, pants, meat, tea, and coffee, etc,” while others waited outside shivering in the cold. At Freedmen’s Hospital, Sojourner noted that hundreds of “patients” were actually old, lame, and helpless freed people. The Freedmen’s Bureau, before closing down forever , awarded Griffing a final $30,000 appropriation. She purchased daily seven hundred loaves of bread, which barely staved off hunger among the able-bodied while the sick could not consume such coarse rations, and continued to starve. Sojourner joined many reformers who deplored these wretched conditions.1 Walking around Washington, she compared the richness of the imposing edifices to the destitute black faces around her. “We helped to pay this cost,” she 356 sojourner truth and the antislavery apostles stated. “We have been a source of wealth to this republic.” Black people labored in the cotton fields that created the cities, manufactures, and employment for white people. “Beneath the burning southern sun have we toiled . . . earning millions in money. . . . Our nerves and sinews, our tears and blood, have been sacrificed.” Freed people, she told an audience, had earned “land enough for white people . . . to be entitled to a small farm apiece themselves.”2 Land, she said, was her people’s entitlement and the key to their economic independence, industry, and mobility. Black Southerners were born and bred to the soil; they loved the land as they loved family connections. Since unpaid black labor was the stepping-stone to white financial success, surely, she said, “some of these dividends must be ours.” She was not the only one who thought so. When Republicans first insisted “If we give the Negro a bayonet, why can’t we not give him a ballot?” reformers added, “Why can we not first grant him a little place of his own?” Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass once advocated land along with the ballot. And in 1867, Radical congressman Thaddeus Stevens had proposed dividing Southern lands into 40-acre plots for purchase by each liberated male or family head, and providing money to build a dwelling. This would not only nourish “the happiness and respectability of the colored race, but their very existence.” Homesteads, he added, “to them are far more valuable than the immediate right of suffrage, though both are their due.” Congress would not tamper with property rights, but public lands offered another possibility. After Stevens’s death, Radical congressman George W. Julian fought successfully to reserve hundreds of thousands of acreage for settler occupation, and black congressman Benjamin Turner proposed establishing a land commission on behalf of landless freed people. Gerrit Smith and three hundred other reformers also sent a petition to the Forty-first Congress supporting the idea. This commission would be made up of disinterested friends of the freed people and would appoint agents to consult with black leaders and associations in the selection and purchase of homestead lands worth $2 million. The commission would retain title until, by installments, the freed people paid back the government.3 This idea created a controversy. Powerful Horace Greeley insisted that blacks take advantage of public lands only on their own: “Better tell them at once. . . . Root, hog! Or die!” Standard editor Aaron Powell spoke for other reformers in reminding Greeley of rural freed people’s unusual circumstances and disabilities. After years of unpaid toil, they had been suddenly emancipated amid a hostile community that cheated them out of their wages and denied them redress. How could freed people travel to public land? Who would pay the “railroad fare and supply their food for the journey—not to mention tools...

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