Jackson was among the first freedmen in Georgia to get one of these land titles, choosing to begin his life after the war on a plot carved out of the very rice fields where he’d spent his years enslaved. We came across that title as part of the Center for Public Integrity’s years-long effort to search through nearly 1.8 million records, which allowed us to identify 1,250 formerly enslaved men and women, including Jackson, who received land titles in Georgia and South Carolina in the months that followed Sherman’s field orders.