What Was The Impact Of The Port Royal Experiment

Edward L. Pierce, a 19th century author and politician, was given control of an island of recently freed slaves in 1982 in order to construct a model for integration based labor and property ownership for the freedmen. The sea islands off the coast of North Carolina used to be populated by primarily slaves working for the plantations based on the island and their masters, but after the island was taken by union soldiers and the masters run off, the now free slaves were left to their own devices. The US Treasury decided to let these former slaves work the plantations for wages, educate them, and even let them own property. Pierce established this system, bringing educators and overseers to assist in the work, and published his report of the

Thomas Jefferson, though writing long before the civil war, endorsed a gradual emancipation and colonization of the slaves, rather than outright freedom, concerned with their ability to peacefully coexist with white Americans. One of the more progressive ideas came in the form of giving the former slaves land, wages, and freedom equal to that of any other free man. This, however, was not a popular plan among many of the people of the time, believing that African Americans are inherently inferior to white Americans. If this assumption was true, then obviously we couldn’t integrate them into society, as they wouldn’t work or contribute to society in a meaningful way. The Port Royal Experiment sought to prove the validity of this claim, one way or

Like John Locke asserts, once the freedmen were given the ability to own property, they immediately desired this, and put a great deal of labor in their own property. One of the primary arguments against integration was that African Americans would not properly work their land when they were free to choose the extent of their own labor. The events of the colony of Port Royal immediately prove this assumption false, before the experiment even begins. Later, once the experiment begins, the land owned by the government is used as farms where the freedmen are paid fair wages to work. Pierce says of the laborers, “...during their first year under the new system, (the laborers) have acquired the idea of ownership, and of the security of wages, and have come to see that labor and slavery are not the same thing.” This could be a massive revelation to many of the abolitionists against integration, who may have doubted the African American’s ability to work under the system of free