V/O Fan Butler
The day was cloudless, the air soft and balmy; the wild vegetation that edged the river beautiful beyond description...Not a sound broke the stillness but the dip of our oars and the wild minor chant of the Negro boatmen.

NARRATOR
Anxious to reclaim their land, 28-year-old Fan Butler and her father, Pierce, were nearing their plantation on St. Simon's Island in Georgia. Rice, not cotton, had been king here before the war. And Pierce Butler had been one of the richest of the rice aristocracy. Fan Butler's mother, the celebrated English actress Fanny Kemble, had made headlines around the world, when she publicly declared that she could not live with a slaveholder. After her parents divorced, Fan Butler had to make a choice.

DUNCAN
She was involved in not a brothers' war, but a family war. When her parents were divorced, she took sides, and she sided with the South and with her father.

NARRATOR
From the safety of Philadelphia, the Butlers heard that their land was being confiscated by victorious Union troops.

NELSON
Pierce saw it not only as the possible ending of his family's plantations in Georgia, but he saw it as the end of the way of life that he treasured. And so they headed back South as soon as they could.

NARRATOR
They found the Butler plantation in ruins.

V/O Fan Butler
My bed stood under a hole in the roof, through which the rains came. The whole country was absolutely swept. Not a chicken, not an egg was left. For weeks I lived on [nothing but] hominy, rice, and fish.

NARRATOR
Fan and Pierce got one piece of good news: a federal decree returned the plantations to their original owners. But their claim on the land was fiercely resisted by freedmen.

AYERS
Black southerners say, "the South is mine too." I helped make this place. I remember when this plantation was nothin' other than woods. And we cleared it. And it's ours. And I'm not leaving. This is rich land."

V/O Fan Butler
We found the Negroes on St. Simon's Island in a very different frame of mind. They had been brought under the influence of Northerners, some of whom had filled the poor people's minds with all sorts of vain hopes and ideas, among others that their former masters would not be allowed to return, and the land was theirs.

NARRATOR
In this charged atmosphere, the Butlers had to negotiate with their former slaves.

V/O Fan Butler
My father... told [the Negroes] they might have [their corn and cotton], but that they must put in twenty acres for him, for which he would give them food and clothing, and another year, when he hoped to put in several hundred acres, they should share the crop. They consented without any show of either pleasure or the reverse.

NARRATOR
The new system came to be called sharecropping, but many landowners wanted something more than their share.

NELSON
Pierce's plan was to evolve his relationship with his former slaves back into something that would probably look and work a lot like slavery. And as Fan would later say, when it was her land, "You have the freedom to leave, but I have freedom too. And what's more, I own this land. And if you're going to stay here, you have to do what I say."

NARRATOR
Fan Butler was not as confident as she sounded.

V/O Fan Butler
We are, I am afraid, going to have terrible trouble... with the Negroes, and I see nothing but gloomy prospects for us ahead.