Context: After the war, African-Americans tried to make a life for themselves however they could. Thousands of acres of land had been confiscated from Confederate and certain Union Generals had promised to redistribute that land to Freedmen. Many African Americans did not wait for official orders and began farming and living on the abandoned land, some of which they had lived on for many years before as slaves. Unfortunately, land redistribution never happened, as President Johnson returned almost all of this land to the original owners, forcing freedmen to leave their farms and homes.


In 1866, after Army officials forced freedman Bayley Wyatt to vacate the Virginia land he had occupied since the end of the war, he argued at a public meeting for freedpeople’s right to the land as follows:

We now, as a people desires to be elevated, and we desires to do all we can to be educated, and we hope our friends will aid us all they can . . .

I may state to all our friends, and to all our enemies, that we has a right to the land where we are located. For why? I tell you. Our wives, our children, our husbands, has been sold over and over again to purchase the lands we now locate upon; for that reason we have a divine right to the land . . .

And then didn’t we clear the land and raise the crops of corn, of cotton, of tobacco, of rice, of sugar, of everything? And then didn’t them large cities in the North grow up on the cotton and the sugars and the rice that we made? Yes! I appeal to the South and the North if I hasn’t spoken the words of truth. I say they have grown rich, and my people is poor.

Questions: Respond in complete sentences
Why does Wyatt claim to have a “divine right” to the land he was occupying?



According to the second paragraph, why do the North and South owe them land?



Based on the source, would you say that Bailey Wyatt is fully free? Why or why not?