Edda Fields-Black

It really does.

It really, really does.

Think about what the come-be-freedom-seekers' lives were like in these ghastly death camps, labor-slash-death camps of these rice plantations.

By the time they're parading down Beaufort, they finally made it.

They're finally free.

Colonel James Montgomery gives a speech to the freedom seekers and Harriet Tubman follows him.

And we don't know what she said.

There's no transcript and it's not on YouTube, but... Oh, if only.

I know.

Your life would be so much easier.

So much easier.

I can't even imagine.

But, you know, it's after her speech that 150 men aged 14 to 70, there was one 70-year-old man who enlisted.

The morning after they're liberated, they enlist in the second South Carolina Volunteers.

It was a very immediate kind of thing that they came and liberated us.

We are going to liberate others.

Right.

About 200,000 black men served during the Civil War.

And after the war is over, those men, their widows, their dependent children were entitled to military pensions, just like veterans today.

And that application process was long and laborious, and it required a lot of paperwork.