Status Updates From Sheridan’s Secret Mission: ...

An Army colonel stationed in Mississippi told Schurz that white people refused to”to sell or lease lands to black men,” believing that if freedmen were held propertyless and could not raise their own crops, they would be forced to resume plantation labor at barely subsistence wages, and that “this kind of slavery will be better than none at all.” 132

Assigning black children to lengthy unpaid “apprenticeships” with planters who taught no marketable skills beyond “field hand” seemed like slavery renamed. -74

In our own day, when an assault on the US Capitol by a mob of thousands is portrayed as an innocent meander of tourists by partisan news outlets, despite exhaustive photographic evidence to the contrary, the complaints of Southern Republicans about 1870s press coverage might be easier to credit. -9