The broken promise of land for freed families, rooted in General Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15 of January 1865 and reversed within the year.
The phrase forty acres and a mule most likely originated with Special Field Order No. 15, issued by Union General William T. Sherman on 16 January 1865, soon after his army reached Savannah. Four days earlier Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton had met with twenty Black leaders of Savannah to discuss what emancipation should mean. The order set aside a coastal strip running from Charleston, South Carolina, to the St. Johns River in Florida, including Georgia’s Sea Islands, and made roughly 400,000 acres available to freed families in forty-acre plots.
General Rufus Saxton was appointed to oversee the settlements and ensure that settlers received title, and Sherman allowed the army to lend mules to the new farmers. About 40,000 freedpeople settled on the land. For Sherman the order was partly a military expedient, a way to provide for the thousands of Black refugees following his army and to punish the planters of the rice coast. In March 1865 Congress also authorized the new Freedmen’s Bureau to manage abandoned and confiscated lands for the benefit of freedpeople.
The promise did not survive the year. President Andrew Johnson’s amnesty and his pardons of former Confederates allowed planters to reclaim their property, and in the fall of 1865 he overturned Sherman’s order. Most of the coastal land was returned to its former white owners, and apart from a small number who held valid titles, freed families were removed.
The consequences were lasting. Without land of their own, most freedpeople had little choice but to work land owned by others, usually as sharecroppers (see sharecropping), and Southern legislatures quickly passed Black Codes designed to keep them on the plantations. The short-lived order is now cited by advocates of reparations as evidence of a government promise to the formerly enslaved that was made and then withdrawn.
See also: Freedmen’s Bureau, Sharecropping, Reconstruction, Emancipation, Black Codes
Sources
- New Georgia Encyclopedia, “Sherman’s Field Order No. 15.” Link
- U.S. Senate Historical Office, “Freedmen’s Bureau Acts of 1865 and 1866.” Link
- New Georgia Encyclopedia, “Sharecropping.” Link
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