![]() Union military officers, government officials, Northern civilians, African American soldiers and liberated slaves transformed Beaufort and the surrounding Sea Islands into a laboratory and working model of the post–Civil War New South. Beginning in Beaufort, South Carolina only seven months after the firing on Fort Sumter, it encompassed plans for the rebuilding and reshaping of fundamental American institutions including the lawmaking process, family structure, church organization and the definition of American citizenship. Historians refer to the Port Royal Experiment as the first major attempt by Northerners to reconstruct the Southern political and economic system. These events led up to the eventual confiscation of 101,930 acres of land with a portion being distrubuted to newly freedmen and set the stage for what became the Port Royal Experiment. This inaction allowed for the seizure of most sea island plantations for non payment of taxes. Newly installed Government officials in Beaufort took possession of land records and census data and under their new taxing authority, began notifying district plantation and property owners (via newspaper disclosures) of property taxes due.įearing reprisals by confederate forces should they pay the tax, land owners en masse, failed to comply. Concurrently, northern abolitionists persuaded the federal government to redistribute "Lands of the Insurrection" in small parcels to the freedmen. Burdened with this as well as the rising costs of funding hostilities, the US Congress passed The Revenue Act of 1862, becoming the first federal income tax in the United States. The immediate effects of them Union foothold in Beaufort, was the emancipation of up to 10,000 slaves who’s care now became the responsibility of the Union forces.
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