It had long been the more or less definitely expressed theory of the North that all the chief problems of Emancipation might be settled by establishing the slaves on the forfeited lands of their masters-a sort of poetic justice, said some. But this poetry done into solemn prose meant either wholesale confiscation of private property in the South or vast appropriations. Now Congress had not appropriated a cent, and no sooner did the proclamations of general amnesty appear than the eight hundred thousand acres of abandoned lands in the hands of the Freedmen's Bureau melted quickly away.
( W.E.B. Du Bois )
[ The Souls of Black Folk ]
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