Debate Between Douglas And Lincoln 1858

    In 1865, Union officials met with twenty black ministers in Savannah, Georgia. When asked how the freedmen might best secure their freedom and independence, the spokesman for the ministers, Garrison Frazier, said the following: “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor… and we can soon maintain ourselves and have something to spare.” Did most of the freedmen in the South get the land that Frazier said was essential for freedom and independence? Did sharecropping, the economic arrangement under which many landless freedmen labored, provide independence and freedom? Were the sharecroppers truly free?