PART THREE: 40 ACRES AND A LIE

Months later, in November 1866, a federal agent issued Pompey Jackson a “first-class warrant” to buy land in Beaufort County as consolation for his now worthless title to part of William Habersham’s plantation. But Jackson wouldn’t leave Georgia, instead joining a number of freedmen who stayed in the Savannah area and found jobs as porters, housekeepers, and dockworkers.Jackson was hired as a carpenter for a white man named William Carmichael, who had bought Causton’s Bluff, one of the Habersham family’s rice plantations. Jackson built shotgun houses for formerly enslaved workers who lived on the land for free, were paid 71 cents per day, and were permitted to use some of the land to plant their own cotton to sell. In 1867, he married Patience Simmons, a freedwoman from South Carolina, according to public records we reviewed. He registered to vote in Savannah.