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ON 7 November i86i, Union forces sailed into Port Royal Sound and opened fire on Forts Beauregard and Walker. The small garrison of Confederate soldiers posted there retreated within a few hours and urged whites living on the South Carolina Sea Islands to flee to the mainland with them. In their hasty evacuation, white planters left behind the majority of their slaves, numbering about 8,000, then in the midst of harvesting the cotton for which the Sea Islands were world renowned. Suddenly free, some former slaves celebrated, understandably, by looting their owners' properties.
The resulting power vacuum in this prosperous area drew the attention of Northern abolitionists as well as administrators. While the Treasury Department was interested in the profits of the Sea island cotton crops, it lacked the funds and appropriate personnel to oversee the newly won properties. Abolitionists saw the islands as a perfect test case in which to demonstrate the capacities of the freed African Americans. In early 1862, Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase sent his abolitionist friend and Boston lawyer Edward Pierce to investigate the Sea Islands. Pierce then persuaded Chase to give benevolent societies in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia government passes to reside in the occupied territories for the purposes of educating and supervising the newly freed African Americans. The government offered the volunteers transportation and military rations, but their financial support was largely underwritten by wealthy Northern abolitionists. In March 1862, some fifty-three highly educated young teachers, ministers, and doctors left New England to reside in the Sea Islands, where they volunteered their time and expertise to operate schools and churches, to provide sanitary training for the African Americans, and to oversee their commercial plantings. The Sea Islands numbered among the first communities in the Civil War to make the transition from slavery to freedom, and the whole nation carefully followed the progress and travails of this "Port Royal Experiment," conducted under the watchful supervision of the volunteer band of "Gideonites."1
Although spurred to action by different motives, this group of Northerners shared a single mission. In short, they understood that the success of the Port Royal Experiment in creating social and economic order in the Sea Islands would demonstrate the fitness of four million African Americans...