"Blow ye the trumphet, blow 

The gladly solemn sound 

Let all the nations know 

The Year of Jubilee has come.”

—The Year of Jubilee 

The Beach Institute African-American Cultural Center 

Confederate military forces evacuated Savannah on December 20, 1864. The Union army occupied the city the following day. The Civil War and slavery had finally come to an end for Savannahians.  

To commemorate the historic event, a large crowd jammed the Second African Baptist Church. A hymn celebrating The Year of Jubilee was sung by all present, accompanied by a thousand tears of joy. 

Christmas Day 1864 marked the first time in Savannah when all African American Christians who gathered in a House of Worship were allowed to celebrate Christ’s birth as free men, women, and children. While General William Tecumseh Sherman presented Savannah to President Abraham Lincoln as a Christmas gift, Black residents throughout the city were overwhelmed with new hopes, new promises, and new possibilities for the freedom to own land and to open schools for their children. 

On January 12, 1865, while the Civil War still raged on in other parts of the country, General Sherman and U.S. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton met at the home of Charles Green (see PFS-61) with 20 religious leaders among Savannah’s African American churches. Four days later, General Sherman issued his Special Field Order No. 15, which confiscated hundreds of thousands of acres of coastline property from Charleston, South Carolina, to the St. John’s River in Florida. 

Land redistribution had been pushed forward in a Congress concerned about the country's future reconstruction, notably by radical Republicans. Sherman’s order claimed these lands “…are reserved and set apart for the settlement of the BLACKS now made free by the acts of war and the proclamation of the President of the United States.” Divided into 40-acre tracts, and later adding one mule no longer needed by the army after the war, The ‘40-Acres and a Mule’ trope was born. 

A month before Robert E. Lee surrendered at the Appomattox courthouse in April 1865, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands — informally known as The Freedmen’s Bureau — was established by Congress to assist the millions of former slaves and poor whites who were made refugees by the war. The Freedmen’s Bureau also worked with the American Missionary Association and other private charities to build thousands of schools for newly freed Black children in the South. 

Named after Alfred Ely Beach, The Beach Institute was the first school in Savannah created explicitly for the education of newly freed Black slaves after the Civil War. In 1867, Mr. Beach, an inventor and the publisher of Scientific American magazine donated funds to purchase the site.  

Initially, 600 students enrolled at the new school in downtown Savannah. The ongoing tuition was one dollar per month. In 1874, the Institute became part of the local Savannah Board of Education and was thereafter a tax-supported institution. The school closed in 1919. 

The site was reborn in 1989 as The Beach Institute African-American Cultural Center. It is part of The King-Tisdell Cottage Foundation Inc (see PFS-97), founded by W.W. Law, who served as the President of the Savannah-chapter of the NAACP between 1950 and 1976. 

After the assassination of Lincoln in April 1865, President Andrew Johnson made adverse changes to the land redistribution plans of the Freedmen’s Bureau and its ‘reconstruction’ efforts in the Southern states. Strangely, Lincoln and Johnson had met for only the first time at Lincoln’s Second Inauguration.