The pestilent marshlands of Georgia’s barrier islands hardly seem like fertile soil for revolution. But that’s precisely what happened there in the early months of 1865, as the Confederacy crumbled beneath the Union’s relentless assault. From his villa in recently captured Savannah, William Tecumseh Sherman ordered the great rice plantations that dominated the coast to be turned over to the slaves his troops had liberated, with each family receiving “not more than 40 acres of tillable ground.”

The pestilent marshlands of Georgia’s barrier islands hardly seem like fertile soil for revolution. But that’s precisely what happened there in the early months of 1865, as the Confederacy crumbled beneath the Union’s relentless assault. From his villa in recently captured Savannah, William Tecumseh Sherman ordered the great rice plantations that dominated the coast to be turned over to the slaves his troops had liberated, with each family receiving “not more than 40 acres of tillable ground.” Immediately, thousands of African Americans poured into the area, hoping to build homesteads, churches, schools — the foundations of freedom — on the sodden land where slavery had flourished. America’s promise of liberty finally fulfilled. The world turned upside down.

The region was built on egregious inequalities. Before the war, planters, slave traders and merchants lived in the sybaritic comfort of Savannah’s elegant central district, surrounded by ramshackle neighborhoods reserved for the city’s working-class majority. Just beyond Savannah lay some of the South’s largest plantations, where most of the nation’s rice crop was grown, and where small armies of slaves spent their days knee-deep in the stagnant water of the paddies, churning out the profits that made their masters spectacularly wealthy. Little wonder that when Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860 seemed to threaten the slave system, Savannah’s grandees raced off to war.

 In the spring of 1862, Union troops captured the fort that sat at the mouth of the Savannah River, a move that gave them control of most of the plantations. Rather than take the city, though, Northern ­forces simply shut it off, slowly squeezing it into deprivation. Not until December 1864 was Savannah finally threatened with invasion. It was a terrifying moment: 62,000 of Sherman’s men marching south from the ruins of Atlanta. Rather than face destruction, the city’s fathers chose to surrender. Sherman entered Savannah three days before Christmas, bringing with him grand hopes of a new world about to be born.

African Americans wanted self-determination: the right to control their labor, reconstruct their families, teach their children and shape their communities as they saw fit. They also understood that to secure those rights they had to have a full and equal voice in the political process. For its part, Savannah’s planter class desperately wanted to hold on to as much of its power as possible. For the first few years after the Civil War the two sides pitted their visions against each other in a series of running battles. African Americans claimed plots of land; plantation owners took them back. ­Planters agreed to hire former slaves desperate for work, but only under the most onerous terms. Come harvest time freedmen went on strike to insist on better conditions. African Americans demanded the vote; whites threatened violence when they tried to use it.

Freedmen had a fighting chance as long as they could count on the support of the federal government. But Washington’s commitment to racial justice, always tenuous, quickly faded. In the process, revolution gave way to restoration. By the early 1870s African Americans had been driven out of Savannah’s political life. In the surrounding countryside blacks had been reduced to a largely landless peasantry, eking out meager livings on tiny parcels of rented land. And all along the Georgia coast local officials began to impose systematic segregation, the legalized humiliation that would culminate in Jim Crow.