Bernard Powers

And it gets to be really chaotic.

Over the next several months, black folks start burning gin houses and crops of white farmers around York County.

He comes in and he's interested in one thing.

He's interested in getting rid of the Ku Klux Klan.

Hi.

Hi.

This is Carolyn from Wappingers Falls, New York, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR.

Part one, there had never been peace.

When the war began and black Carolinians heard the first shots, a lot of those people heard the sound of freedom.

Legally, there's a new situation, but the notion of freedom is...

And it was for them a vague and amorphous notion.

And they knew that to really be free, they had to do things.

They had to determine what freedom looked like, and that's what they did in so many ways.

And they make all of those decisions in freedom.

You can see advertisements that they put in local newspapers.

For husbands, wives, children that had been sold away.

Create schools to learn how to read and write.

They decided that if they were free, they could labor in whatever way they decided.

Virtually all of the fighting during the Civil War occurred in the South.

And so there was widespread destruction and disrepair.