Alexander Harris

Biography

Alexander Harris (1818–1909) was an African-American deacon, trustee, interim pastor of the First Bryan Baptist Church and one of the most powerful African-American religious and civil leaders in Savannah, Georgia during the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century. With U.S. Civil War public figure Garrison Frazier and eighteen other African-American ministers and church officials, Harris met with Military Division of the Mississippi Union Army Major-General William Tecumseh Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton on January 12, 1865, at Sherman's Green-Meldrim House headquarters in Savannah, Georgia. This famous meeting, widely regarded as the "Savannah Colloquy" or the "Forty acres and a mule" meeting, resulted in Sherman issuing, on January 16, 1865, Special Field Orders, No.

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