[United States Statutes at Large, Volume 131, 115th Congress, 1st Session]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

 
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

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American political influence and land ownership endured there long after
setbacks in other regions. In short, events and people from Beaufort
County illustrate 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 Vol

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unteers 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 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,

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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 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

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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;
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 Na

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tional 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 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 ac

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tions 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.
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.
BARACK OBAMA


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