The first approach for how to treat these people were by having them labor for wages, like a free white man would. The Union had them continue to farm cotton, paying them $1 for every 400 pounds harvested. However, many families turned to growing food for themselves, selling and profiting from the initial surplus of cotton.
Soon, teachers came to the island, paid by the New England Freedmen's Aid Society, believing a solid education could bring these freed blacks up from the dust of slavery. Laura Matilda Towne, a white American from Pennsylvania, educated them and helped to establish Penn missionary school on St. Helena Island.
The next issue was land distribution. While some Northerners believed wage working more liberating than land, Abraham Lincoln opened nearly 40,000 acres of Confederate land open for sale. Banks, white entrepreneurs, and the blacks of the Sea Islands bought it. This gave liberty to black people in a whole new way, even helping to form the first all-black town in America, Mitchelville.
As the war came to a close, interest in the Port Royal Experiment waned. Most progressives sought not only land and wages for black people, but the right to vote. The president after Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, ended the experiment by trying to give the land back to white settlers. Many black farmers stayed put anyhow, sustaining themselves into the 20th century.
Sources:
textbook, pages 574-575
https://www.civilwarwomenblog.com/port-royal-experiment/
http://www.blackpast.org/aah/port-royal-experiment-1862-1865
I really like your post Bennett because you chose a hard unique topic, I did not know much about the Sea Islands, and you explained it very well. I remembered reading a little about this in the textbook so I reread the chapter and I found out that the teachers you mentioned like Laura M. Towne, Charlotte Forteen being another name, where members of a group called the Gideonites. The Sea Islands were not the only place were slaves were freed after their owners fled when the union soldiers marched in. Many slaves who were freed joined the union army. Do you think that people like Gideonites were even more eager to help the newly freed slaves because they thought that they had deserved their freedom since many of those slaves who were freed joined the union army, an example being the 54th Massachusetts volunteers?
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