The Weeping Time: Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American History

The Sea Islands fell to the United States early in the war, and the Federal government launched an experiment to transition former slaves to freedom, an effort historian Willie Lee Rose masterfully recounts in Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (1964), another important secondary source the author ignores. On St. Simons Island, home to one of Butler's plantations, the population in 2010 was 95 percent white and 3 percent black-a reversal of the antebellum pattern-with an average median household income of almost $78,000. Randy J. Sparks RANDY J. SPARKS is a professor of history at Tulane University and the author of several books, including Where the Negroes Are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade (Harvard University Press, 2014).