In an agricultural society the possession of land is the key to affluence, the source of economic security, and the basis of an estate to be passed on to one's children. Surrounded by an agrarian economy, the ex-slave felt that his economic independence required the acquisition of land. The Reverend Garrison Frazier, a Negro spokesman for a group of freedmen, at a meeting in Savannah told General Sherman and Secretary of War Stanton in 1864: “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn in and till it by our own labor…. We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own. ” Whitelaw Reid related a conversation with an old man of sixty: “What'se of being free if you do n't own land enough to be buried in? Might juss as well stay slave all yo'days.”