We read at historynet.com “By the end of the Civil War, the federal government controlled 850,000 acres that had been confiscated from Rebel Southerners under wartime provisions.” It must be acknowledged that at the conclusion of the Civil War, that despite the impressive industrialization in the north -- that the southern States, were on the other hand, still primarily a land-based society, depending upon that land producing for them, money and wealth, such as by their agricultural crops, cotton, tobacco, rice, and the like. Further to the point, the literary rate in the south, which while pretty good for the most part, was still far below today's literacy rate, and in regards, for those that were enslaved, abysmally low. So too, those formerly enslaved, but now so freed, had in most cases, no material assets at all, except the clothes on their backs, perhaps some tools, in addition to, some pots and pans. So then, in a situation of an era in which wealth was produced by the labor upon the land, and of which, former slaves, were experts in that field, then the most valuable material asset that this government, of, for, and by the people, could provide for those that had been treated as no more than chattel, would be the fair usage of or the ownership of the land so confiscated from those that had had the audacity to rebel against their own national government, and had lost that bloody war.
That's the way things should have been but history tells us that it is not the way that things worked out, because ultimately those in charge of the redistribution of those lands, and of protecting and aiding the freedman, just didn't have the heart, the mindset, or the willingness to do what was so necessitated to succeed; but rather abandoned those that had nothing, to thereby leave them with nothing, and to essentially give back to those that rebelled, everything.
Now, here we stand today, over one hundred and fifty years later, and unquestionably land is still a very valuable asset in which the average middle class American, has a substantial amount of their wealth tied up in that land, as in the house that they so live in, and of which the black race home ownership rate is leagues behind the white race, which is a significant reason why the wealth of the average middle class white American dominates the same of those that are black.
It is of extreme disappointment, that those that gave their all in the name of freedom and of unity, have seen that dream betrayed, by essentially the ill-advised return of those acres of land to the very same type and class of people who brought this great civil war upon this nation. That was a grave mistake, of which, those that have suffered enough, have suffered even further. The past cannot be changed, but the present allows us to make changes to that which must be changed. That is why, this present-day government needs to do right, by providing the progeny of those that were ill served and betrayed by its national government, at a time when their forefathers surely needed that government's vision, aid and succor, with some sort of modern equivalency of that land so lost, or have that nation meanly lose what it was always meant to nobly save.