One Black person in 1863 wrote that “if the strict law of right and justice is to be observed, the country around me is the entailed inheritance of the Americans of African descent, purchased by the invaluable labor of our ancestors, through a life of tears and groans, under the lash and yoke of tyranny.”
Instead, however, the plantations that were abandoned during the Civil War were leased to the people who used to plant them, and to white men of the North. Rather than being landowners, many found themselves not much better off, as reported in a Black-owned newspaper that "The slaves were made serfs and chained to the soil. . . . Such was the boasted freedom acquired by the colored man at the hands of the Yankee."
Lincoln and the Congress compounded this problem with their policy that land that had been confiscated under the Confiscation Act of July 1862 would be returned to the heirs of the Confederate owners to compensate them for their financial loss. In response, a Black physician spoke at a meeting in Boston and said: "Why talk about compensating masters? Compensate them for what? What do you owe them? What does the slave owe them? What does society owe them? Compensate the master? . . . It is the slave who ought to be compensated. The property of the South is by right the property of the slave. . . ."
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A People's History of the United States
Howard Zinn
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