This is the John Fugel-Sang podcast.

Welcome back to Serious XM. I'm John Fugel saying. Somewhere on the Beaufort River is Port Royal, which was the key to an island complex that became a humanitarian mission, an experiment that was both a federal

military installation and a colony for former slaves.

It was there in Port Royal and the other South Carolina Sea islands.

African American slaves first worked this soil as free laborers.

By the end of 1864, there was close to 15,000 freed people living on the islands alongside teams of northern white agents, teachers and businessmen and plantation managers, missionaries.

And this transformation defied expectations.

It led to incredible social progress and crushing injustice.

And it's been criminally undocumented in our schools and Civil War studies.

Bennett Parton is an assistant professor of history at Georgia Southern University.

You may have read his stuff in the Washington Post, the LA Review of Books.

He holds a PhD in History from Yale and he's currently working on a book called Somewhere Toward Freedom, Sherman's March, and the story of America's largest emancipation coming out next year from Simon and Schuster.

It is a great pleasure to welcome Professor Bennett Parton to Sirius XM.

Hey, thanks for having me.

Thank you for joining us.

This story is fascinating, and I'm so embarrassed by how little of its history I've known.

You've written about the Port Royal Experiment. I know you did

your thesis on this. Let me begin with the most basic questions. How did this period of

history come to fascinate you. Oh, well, I grew up in Georgia, and so when I was a history student who was interested in going

on and doing graduate work, I knew that I wanted to do some sort of southern history,

civil war era history. I mean the Civil War is, I mean is the great crucible for

the US South, especially for the state of Georgia, where I grew up.

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