82 FR 6167 - Establishment of the Reconstruction Era National Monument
Executive Office of the President
Federal Register Volume 82, Issue 12 (January 19, 2017)
Page Range
6167-6177
FR Document
2017-01363
Federal Register, Volume 82 Issue 12 (Thursday, January 19, 2017)
[Federal Register Volume 82, Number 12 (Thursday, January 19, 2017)]
[Presidential Documents]
[Pages 6167-6177]
From the Federal Register Online [www.thefederalregister.org]
[FR Doc No: 2017-01363]
Presidential Documents
Federal Register / Vol. 82 , No. 12 / Thursday, January 19, 2017 /
Presidential Documents
___________________________________________________________________
Title 3--
The President
[[Page 6167]]
Proclamation 9567 of January 12, 2017
Establishment of the Reconstruction Era National
Monument
By the President of the United States of America
A Proclamation
The Reconstruction Era, a period spanning the early
Civil War years until the start of Jim Crow racial
segregation in the 1890s, was a time of significant
transformation in the United States, as the Nation
grappled with the challenge of integrating millions of
newly freed African Americans into its social,
political, and economic life. It was in many ways the
Nation's Second Founding, as Americans abolished
slavery and struggled earnestly, if not always
successfully, to build a nation of free and equal
citizens. During Reconstruction, Congress passed the
Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth constitutional
amendments that abolished slavery, guaranteed due
process and equal protection under the law, and gave
all males the ability to vote by prohibiting voter
discrimination based on race, color, or previous
condition of servitude. Ultimately, the unmet promises
of Reconstruction led to the modern civil rights
movement a century later.
The Reconstruction Era began when the first United
States soldiers arrived in slaveholding territories,
and enslaved people on plantations and farms and in
cities escaped from their owners and sought refuge with
Union forces or in free states. This happened in
November 1861 in the Sea Islands or ``Lowcountry'' of
southeastern South Carolina, and Beaufort County in
particular. Just seven months after the start of the
Civil War, Admiral Samuel F. DuPont led a successful
attack on Port Royal Sound and brought a swath of this
South Carolina coast under Union control. The white
residents (less than twenty percent of the population),
including the wealthy owners of rice and cotton
plantations, quickly abandoned their country
plantations and their homes in the town of Beaufort as
Union forces came ashore. More than 10,000 African
Americans--about one-third of the enslaved population
of the Sea Islands at the time--refused to flee the
area with their owners.
Beaufort County became one of the first places in the
United States where formerly enslaved people could
begin integrating themselves into free society. While
the Civil War raged in the background, Beaufort County
became the birthplace of Reconstruction, or what
historian Willie Lee Rose called a ``rehearsal for
Reconstruction.'' With Federal forces in charge of the
Sea Islands, the Department of the Treasury, with the
support of President Lincoln and the War Department,
decided to turn the military occupation into a novel
social experiment, known as the Port Royal Experiment,
to help former slaves become self-sufficient. They
enlisted antislavery and religious societies in the
North to raise resources and recruit volunteers for the
effort. Missionary organizations headquartered in the
Northeast established outposts in Beaufort County.
In and around Beaufort County during Reconstruction,
the first African Americans enlisted as soldiers, the
first African American schools were founded, early
efforts to distribute land to former slaves took place,
and many of the Reconstruction Era's most significant
African American politicians, including Robert Smalls,
came to prominence. African American political
influence and land ownership endured there long after
setbacks in other regions. In short, events and people
from Beaufort County illustrate
[[Page 6168]]
the most important challenges of Reconstruction--
crucial questions related to land, labor, education,
and politics after the destruction of slavery--and some
early hopeful efforts to address them. The significant
historical events that transpired in Beaufort County
make it an ideal place to tell stories of
experimentation, potential transformation, hope,
accomplishment, and disappointment. In Beaufort County,
including St. Helena Island, the town of Port Royal,
and the city of Beaufort, many existing historic
objects demonstrate the transformative effect of
emancipation and Reconstruction.
Freed people hungered for education, as South Carolina
had long forbidden teaching slaves to read and write.
In 1862, Laura M. Towne and Ellen Murray from
Pennsylvania were among the first northern teachers to
arrive as part of the Port Royal Experiment. They
established a partnership as educators at the Penn
School on St. Helena Island that lasted for four
decades. Charlotte Forten, a well-educated African
American woman from a prominent abolitionist family in
Philadelphia, joined the faculty later that year. The
first classes for the former slaves were held at The
Oaks plantation house, headquarters of the occupying
U.S. military forces in the region. In 1863, Murray and
Towne moved their school into Brick Church, a Baptist
church near the center of the island. In the spring of
1864, supporters in Philadelphia purchased school
buildings for Towne and Murray, and construction of
Penn School began across the field from Brick Church on
50 acres of property donated by Hastings Gantt, an
African American landowner.
Penn School helped many African Americans gain self-
respect and self-reliance and integrate into free
society. Towne and Murray strove to provide an
education comparable to that offered in the best
northern schools. The faculty also provided other
support, including medical care, social services, and
employment assistance. Penn School would evolve into
the Penn Center in the 20th century, and remain a
crucial place for education, community, and political
organizing for decades to come. As a meeting place in
the 1950s and 60s for civil rights leaders, including
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the staff of the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference, this historic
place links the democratic aspirations of
Reconstruction to those of the modern civil rights
movement. Darrah Hall is the oldest standing structure
on the site of the Penn School grounds. Students and
community members built it around 1903, during the
transition in the South from the Reconstruction Era to
an era of racial segregation and political
disenfranchisement.
The Brick Church where Towne and Murray held classes in
1863-64 is today the oldest church on St. Helena
Island. Once freed from their owners, African Americans
in Beaufort County wanted to worship in churches and
join organizations they controlled. The Brick Church--
also known as the Brick Baptist Church--was built by
slaves in 1855 for the white planters on St. Helena
Island. When the white population fled from the Sea
Islands in 1861, the suddenly freed African Americans
made the church their own. The Brick Church has been a
place of worship and gathering ever since, and
continues to serve the spiritual needs of the community
to this day.
Camp Saxton in Port Royal--formerly the site of a
plantation owned by John Joyner Smith--is where the
First South Carolina Regiment Volunteers mustered into
the U.S. Army and trained from November 1862 to January
1863. In August 1862, U.S. Brigadier General Rufus
Saxton, the military governor of the abandoned
plantations in the Department of the South, received
permission to recruit five thousand African Americans,
mostly former slaves, into the Union Army. The former
slaves assumed that military service would lead to
rights of citizenship. Saxton selected Captain Thomas
Wentworth Higginson of the 51st Massachusetts, a former
Unitarian minister, abolitionist, and human rights
activist, to command the regiment. An important ally of
Higginson and the African American troops was Harriet
Tubman, the famed conductor on the Underground
Railroad, who in May of 1862
[[Page 6169]]
arrived in Beaufort as part of the Port Royal
Experiment and who served skillfully as a nurse at Camp
Saxton.
Camp Saxton was also the location of elaborate and
historic ceremonies on January 1, 1863, to announce and
celebrate the issuance of the Emancipation
Proclamation, which freed all slaves in states then
``in rebellion'' against the United States. General
Saxton himself had attended church services at the
Brick Church in the fall of 1862 to recruit troops and
to invite everyone, African American and white, ``to
come to the camp . . . on New Year's Day, and join in
the grand celebration.'' This Emancipation Proclamation
celebration was particularly significant because it
occurred in Union-occupied territory in the South where
the provisions of the Proclamation would actually take
effect before the end of the war.
Over five thousand people, including freed men, women,
and children, Union military officials, guest speakers,
and missionary teachers, gathered around the speakers'
platform built in a grove of live oaks near the Smith
plantation house. One of the majestic witness trees has
become known as the Emancipation Oak. Of all the
prayers, hymns, and speeches during the three-hour
ceremony, one of the most moving was the spontaneous
singing of ``My country, tis of thee; Sweet land of
liberty'' when the American flag was presented to
Higginson. As part of the celebration, the military had
prepared a feast of roasted oxen for all to enjoy.
The town of Beaufort was the center of the County's
social, political, cultural, and economic life during
the Reconstruction Era. Before the Battle of Port Royal
Sound in November 1861, Beaufort was where the planters
spent the summer months in their grand homes. Beaufort
served as the depot for plantation supplies transported
there by steamship. The Old Beaufort Firehouse, built
around 1912, stands near the heart of Reconstruction
Era Beaufort, across the street from the Beaufort
Arsenal, and within walking distance of over fifty
historic places. The Beaufort Arsenal, the location
today of the Beaufort History Museum, was built in
1799, rebuilt in 1852, and renovated by the Works
Progress Administration in 1934, and served
historically as the home of the Beaufort Volunteer
Artillery Company that fought in the Revolutionary and
Civil Wars.
Several historic Beaufort properties within walking
distance of the Firehouse are associated with Robert
Smalls, the most influential African American
politician in South Carolina during the Reconstruction
Era. Robert Smalls was born in Beaufort in 1839, the
son of slaves of the Henry McKee family. When Smalls
was twelve years old, his owner hired him out to work
in Charleston, where he learned to sail, rig, and pilot
ships. In May 1862, Smalls navigated the CSS Planter, a
Confederate ship, through Charleston harbor, past the
guns of Fort Sumter, and turned it over to Union
forces. This courageous escape made him an instant hero
for the Union, and he soon began working as a pilot for
the U.S. Navy. Smalls and his family used prize money
awarded for the Planter to purchase the house in
Beaufort once owned by the family that had owned him.
In 1864, Smalls was named to a delegation of African
American South Carolinians to the Republican National
Convention in Baltimore, where the delegation
unsuccessfully petitioned the party to make African
American enfranchisement part of its platform. Elected
to the Beaufort County School Board in 1867, Smalls
began his advocacy for education as the key to African
American success in the new political and economic
order.
In the years immediately following the end of the Civil
War, the United States fiercely debated issues critical
to Reconstruction. Southern Democrats tried to regain
the power they held before the Civil War. The
Republican majorities in the U.S. Congress rebuffed
them, and proceeded to pass legislation and
constitutional amendments to implement the principles
of the Union victory. In 1867, Congress passed the
Military Reconstruction Acts that called for military
administration of southern states and new state
constitutions. Voters elected Robert Smalls as a
delegate to the South Carolina Constitutional
Convention that met in Charleston in January 1868,
where
[[Page 6170]]
he successfully advocated for public education with
compulsory attendance. The resulting constitution also
provided for universal male suffrage and racial,
political, and legal equality. In this new political
order, Robert Smalls was elected to the South Carolina
General Assembly from 1868 to 1874, first as a
representative and then as a senator. In 1874, Smalls
was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, where
he served five terms.
The success of Smalls and other African American
lawmakers who had been enslaved only a handful of years
before infuriated South Carolina's Democrats. Some of
them turned to violence, carried out by the Ku Klux
Klan and others. On more than one occasion, a homegrown
vigilante group known as the Red Shirts terrorized
Robert Smalls.
As a result of the contested Presidential and South
Carolina gubernatorial elections of 1876, deals were
made that effectively ended political and military
Reconstruction in 1877. Smalls, however, continued to
serve in Congress until 1886. He then returned to
Beaufort, and served for many years as the
Presidentially appointed customs collector for the Port
of Beaufort.
In 1895, Smalls was elected a delegate to his second
South Carolina Constitutional Convention. Twenty years
after Democrats had regained control of the State
government, they had figured out how to take back
African Americans' rights as citizens. Smalls spoke
eloquently at the Convention against this blow to
democracy and representative government, but ultimately
rights hard won three decades before were struck down.
South Carolina voters ratified a new constitution that
effectively eliminated African Americans from electoral
politics and codified racial segregation in law for
decades to come.
Even as Jim Crow laws and customs limited political
participation and access to public accommodations,
African Americans maintained visions of freedom and
built strong community institutions. Ownership of land,
access to education, and churches and civic
organizations that took root during the Reconstruction
Era laid the foundation for the modern civil rights
movement.
The many objects of historic interest described above
stand testament to the formative role of the
Reconstruction Era--and the enormous contributions of
those who made it possible--in our shared history.
WHEREAS, section 320301 of title 54, United States Code
(known as the ``Antiquities Act''), authorizes the
President, in his discretion, to declare by public
proclamation historic landmarks, historic and
prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic
or scientific interest that are situated upon the lands
owned or controlled by the Federal Government to be
national monuments, and to reserve as a part thereof
parcels of land, the limits of which shall be confined
to the smallest area compatible with the proper care
and management of the objects to be protected;
WHEREAS, the Beaufort National Historic Landmark
District, which contains many objects of historic
interest including the Old Beaufort Firehouse, was
designated in 1973; and the Penn School National
Historic Landmark District, which also contains many
objects of historic interest including Darrah Hall and
the Brick Baptist Church, was designated in 1974;
WHEREAS, the Camp Saxton Site was listed in the
National Register of Historic Places in 1995;
WHEREAS, portions of the former Camp Saxton Site are
located today on lands administered by the U.S.
Department of the Navy at Naval Support Facility
Beaufort, South Carolina;
WHEREAS, Penn Center, Inc., has donated to the United
States fee title to Darrah Hall at Penn Center, St.
Helena Island, South Carolina, with appurtenant
easements, totaling approximately 3.78 acres of land
and interests in land;
[[Page 6171]]
WHEREAS, Brick Baptist Church has donated to the United
States a historic preservation easement in the Brick
Baptist Church and associated cemetery located on St.
Helena Island, South Carolina, an interest in land of
approximately 0.84 acres;
WHEREAS, the Paul H. Keyserling Revocable Trust and
Beaufort Works, LLC, have donated to the United States
fee title to the Old Beaufort Firehouse at 706 Craven
Street, Beaufort, South Carolina, approximately 0.08
acres of land;
WHEREAS, the designation of a national monument to be
administered by the National Park Service would
recognize the historic significance of Brick Baptist
Church, Darrah Hall, Camp Saxton, and the Old Beaufort
Firehouse, and provide a national platform for telling
the story of Reconstruction;
WHEREAS, it is in the public interest to preserve and
protect these sites;
NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the
United States of America, by the authority vested in me
by section 320301 of title 54, United States Code,
hereby proclaim the objects identified above that are
situated upon lands and interests in lands owned or
controlled by the Federal Government to be the
Reconstruction Era National Monument (monument) and,
for the purpose of protecting those objects, reserve as
a part thereof all lands and interests in lands owned
or controlled by the Federal Government within the
boundaries described on the accompanying map, which is
attached to and forms a part of this proclamation. The
reserved Federal lands and interests in lands encompass
approximately 15.56 acres. The boundaries described on
the accompanying map are confined to the smallest area
compatible with the proper care and management of the
objects to be protected.
All Federal lands and interests in lands within the
boundaries described on the accompanying map are hereby
appropriated and withdrawn from all forms of entry,
location, selection, sale, or other disposition under
the public land laws, from location, entry, and patent
under the mining laws, and from disposition under all
laws relating to mineral and geothermal leasing.
The establishment of the monument is subject to valid
existing rights. If the Federal Government acquires any
lands or interests in lands not owned or controlled by
the Federal Government within the boundaries described
on the accompanying map, such lands and interests in
lands shall be reserved as a part of the monument, and
objects identified above that are situated upon those
lands and interests in lands shall be part of the
monument, upon acquisition of ownership or control by
the Federal Government.
The Secretary of the Interior shall manage the monument
through the National Park Service, pursuant to
applicable legal authorities, consistent with the
purposes and provisions of this proclamation. The
Secretary of the Interior shall prepare a management
plan within 3 years of the date of this proclamation,
with full public involvement, and to include
coordination with Penn Center, Inc., Brick Baptist
Church, the Department of the Navy, Atlantic Marine
Corps Communities, LLC, the City of Beaufort, and the
Town of Port Royal. The management plan shall ensure
that the monument fulfills the following purposes for
the benefit of present and future generations: (1) to
preserve and protect the objects of historic interest
associated with the monument, and (2) to interpret the
objects, resources, and values related to the
Reconstruction Era. The management plan shall, among
other things, set forth the desired relationship of the
monument to other related resources, programs, and
organizations, both within and outside the National
Park System.
The Secretary of the Navy, or the Secretary of the
Navy's designee, shall continue to have management
authority over Department of the Navy lands within the
monument boundary at the Camp Saxton site, including
the authority to control access to these lands. The
Secretaries of the Navy
[[Page 6172]]
and the Interior shall enter into a memorandum of
agreement that identifies and assigns the
responsibilities of each agency related to such lands,
the implementing actions required of each agency, and
the processes for resolving interagency disputes.
The National Park Service is directed to use applicable
authorities to seek to enter into agreements with
others to address common interests and promote
management efficiencies, including provision of visitor
services, interpretation and education, establishment
and care of museum collections, and preservation of
historic objects.
Given the location of portions of the monument on an
operating military facility, the following provisions
concern U.S. Armed Forces actions by a Military
Department, including those carried out by the United
States Coast Guard:
1. Nothing in this Proclamation precludes the
activities and training of the Armed Forces; however,
they shall be carried out in a manner consistent with
the care and management of the objects to the extent
practicable.
2. In the event of threatened or actual destruction
of, loss of, or injury to a monument resource or
quality resulting from an incident caused by a
component of the Department of Defense or any other
Federal agency, the appropriate Secretary or agency
head shall promptly coordinate with the Secretary of
the Interior for the purpose of taking appropriate
action to respond to and mitigate the harm and, if
possible, restore or replace the monument resource or
quality.
3. Nothing in this proclamation or any regulation
implementing it shall limit or otherwise affect the
U.S. Armed Forces' discretion to use, maintain,
improve, or manage any real property under the
administrative control of a Military Department or
otherwise limit the availability of such real property
for military mission purposes.
Nothing in this proclamation shall be deemed to revoke
any existing withdrawal, reservation, or appropriation;
however, the monument shall be the dominant
reservation.
Nothing in this proclamation shall be construed to
alter the authority or responsibility of any party with
respect to emergency response activities within the
monument.
Warning is hereby given to all unauthorized persons not
to appropriate, injure, destroy, or remove any feature
of this monument and not to locate or settle upon any
of the lands thereof.
[[Page 6173]]
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this
twelfth day of January, in the year of our Lord two
thousand seventeen, and of the Independence of the
United States of America the two hundred and forty-
first.
(Presidential Sig.)
Billing code 3295-F7-P
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[FR Doc. 2017-01363
Filed 1-18-17; 8:45 a.m.]
Billing code 4310-10-C