This is a free preview of Reconstruction, a Slate Academy. Learn more at Slate.com/Reconstruction.

Episode 1: Experiments in Land-owning: Davis Bend and Cameron Place

Some freedpeople ended up owning parcels of the land they had worked when enslaved. Some formed intentional communities to farm it. By the end of Reconstruction, most of them had no land to their names.

Amy Murrell Taylor is the author of The Divided Family in Civil War America.