Johnson Revokes Freedpeople's Land Claims on Edisto Island

In October 1865, Bureau Commissioner Oliver Otis Howard traveled to Edisto Island, South Carolina to inform freedpeople that President Johnson had pardoned former owners and they must vacate the land they were farming under Sherman's orders or submit to contract labor. The assembled freedpeople rejected the terms in a formal petition. Johnson's land restoration policy, extending across the South, foreclosed the one structural remedy that might have made emancipation economically meaningful.