The Treasury Department sent agents to the islands. Northern missionaries and teachers came to set up schools. The freedpeople of the Sea Islands — a substantial and distinctive community who spoke Gullah, a creole language that preserved significant West African linguistic elements alongside English — navigated these outside interventions with a mixture of appreciation for specific resources, particularly education, and resistance to the assumptions that sometimes accompanied those resources.
Land was the central question. The freedpeople wanted to own the land they had worked. Some of them had been working the same parcels for generations. The federal government’s approach to this question varied significantly by who was in charge and what political pressures they were responding to, and the outcome — for most of the Sea Islands’ Black population — was disappointing. Most of the land eventually returned to its former white owners or was sold at prices that the freedpeople could not pay. The exceptions were people like Robert Smalls, who had specific resources — prize money, salary, political recognition — that allowed them to acquire property through formal legal channels.
His purchase of 511 Prince Street was exceptional. The circumstances that made it possible — the prize money from the Planter, the federal tax commissioner’s sale, and the specific timing of the war’s disruption of normal property relationships — were not available to most of the people who had been enslaved on the Sea Islands. What he accomplished was real and what it represented was significant, but it was not a template that could have been replicated by his neighbors.