The 1863 Beaufort tax sales: land that freedpeople bought and kept

In 1863 Robert Smalls bought the house in Beaufort, South Carolina, where he had been born into slavery. He bought it at a federal tax auction — Block 23, Lot B — one of thousands of sales that put Sea Island land into the hands of Black families during the Civil War. Across most of the South, land promised to freedpeople was handed back to its former owners within a few years. Around Beaufort, much of it stayed.

How the land came up for sale

Three wartime laws made it possible:

On November 7, 1861, a Union expedition landed on Hilton Head Island and drove out the Confederate forces. The white planters of St. Helena Parish — today's Beaufort and Jasper Counties — fled inland, leaving their land and the people they had enslaved. Under the new laws the land passed to the federal government for unpaid tax, and the people on it were declared free.

The auction

Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase set up a Direct Tax Commission and sent three commissioners — William Brisbane, Abram Smith and William Wording — to assess the land. Brisbane had once been a Beaufort slaveowner; he renounced slavery, moved north and became an abolitionist, and the occupation brought him home.

The commissioners and General Rufus Saxton argued over whether land should be reserved for Black heads of household. The first auction was postponed and 60,000 acres were set aside. In March 1863, 16,000 acres of abandoned land went on sale, much of it bought by soldiers, including men of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers (later the 33rd U.S. Colored Troops). Sales in the Beaufort District went on until 1890, with more than 2,000 made to Black families; the government also leased land for a year at a time through agreements called indentures.

Land sales on St. Helena Island in the 1860s. National Archives.

What happened elsewhere

General William T. Sherman's Special Field Order No. 15 set aside 400,000 acres of confiscated coast from Charleston to Jacksonville for freedpeople. Unlike the tax-sale land, most of it went back to its prewar owners under President Andrew Johnson's amnesty. Saxton ignored the order to return confiscated land and was relieved of his command for it. By 1867, all but 75,000 of the 400,000 acres had reverted.

Even purchased land was fragile. Freedpeople were wary of the government or lacked reliable lawyers; deeds went unrecorded and were lost, wills were rare, and land passed as heirs' property — owned jointly by descendants, and easy to force into sale. Families who lost it were pushed into sharecropping, a thinly disguised return to the old labour system; those who kept it faced predatory loans and racist attacks. That so many Beaufort families held on into the twentieth century gave them an economic footing that most Black families in the South were denied.

Sources

Written from the National Park Service (Reconstruction Era National Historical Park) article "1863 Beaufort District Tax Sale", a work of the United States government in the public domain, citing U.S. Statutes at Large, vol. 12 (1863), pp. 589–92.