As the Civil War was ending, recently freed Black people were promised land to start independent lives—but Lincoln's assassination led to that plan's demise.
“What do you want for your own people?”
That’s the question Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton suggested Union General William T. Sherman pose to 20 Black pastors in Savannah, Georgia, as the Civil War neared its end and enslaved African Americans neared freedom.
The Black leaders gathered for the January 12, 1865, meeting with the military officials in a mansion called the Green-Meldrim House. They explained that they didn’t want to live among white people, as they feared it would take years for racial prejudice to dissipate in the South. Instead, they wished to live amongst themselves on their own land. That would entail redistributing the land of Southern plantation owners.
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“The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land and turn it
and till it by our own labor,” said the Rev. Garrison Frazier, a
67-year-old Baptist minister and spokesman for the group,
which included individuals who had been enslaved and lived as free men alike.
“We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own,”
Frazier told the Union military officials.
Stanton knew that the meeting was a groundbreaking one, remarking that
for the first time, government officials had asked Black Americans “what they
wanted for themselves.” He gave the minutes taken at the meeting to Henry Ward
Beecher, brother of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” author Harriet Beecher Stowe.
After Beecher read the notes to the congregation of his New York church,
the New York Daily Tribune printed the transcript in its February 13, 1865 edition, providing a historical
record that still exists today. A Black publication named the Christian
Recorder printed the transcript as well.
Confederate
Land Claimed for African Americans
The idea to strip Southern enslavers of their land wasn’t exclusive to the leaders who attended the Green-Meldrim House meeting. Abolitionists Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens had promoted the idea as a way to financially devastate Confederate landowners. Still, Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr. credits Savannah’s Black leaders with spearheading the events that followed.
After meeting with the 20 ministers, Sherman signed Field Order 15 on
January 16, 1865. The order would reserve 400,000 acres of Confederate land for
members of the formerly enslaved population. When the land near the Southeast
coast was evenly redistributed, each family would have 40 acres of tillable
ground.
“Union generals were attempting to divide these slave plantations into
small farm settlements and make them available to the newly freed slaves,” says
Valerie Grim, director of Undergraduate Studies, African American and African
Diaspora Studies and professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies
at Indiana University, Bloomington.
No mention of mules appeared in the order, but some of the formerly
enslaved population were granted Army mules, resulting in this reparations
program being widely known as “40 acres and a mule.”
The freedmen set out to begin working their new land immediately, with a
group of 1,000 settling on Georgia’s Skidaway Island. In subsequent months as
many as 40,000 freedmen settled on the redistributed land.
“They were able to parcel it out to some of the former slaves, but for
the most part, this dream was never realized,” Grim says.
Promise Is
Rescinded After Lincoln's Death
The government didn’t keep its promise. Following President Abraham Lincoln's assassination on
April 15, 1865, President Andrew Johnson rescinded Field Order 15 and
returned to Confederate owners the 400,000 acres of land—“a strip of coastline
stretching from Charleston, South Carolina to the St. John’s River in Florida,
including Georgia’s Sea Islands and the mainland 30 miles in from the coast.”
Roy L. Brooks, a distinguished professor of law at the University of San
Diego School of Law, described Johnson as a segregationist “who wanted to
basically return African Americans to a position of subordination.” Johnson,
though, was not the only politician who opposed this form of reparations for
Black Americans.
“After the Civil War, there just wasn't that appetite for Black
reparations,” Brooks says. “There were other proposals made after the war for
reparations for African Americans. Congress declined to go forward with
reparations. So, it was not just Johnson. There was an attitude among the
Congress that African Americans should simply be happy with being freed.”
African
Americans Forced to Work as Sharecroppers
“You had a massive system of sharecropping evolving in the South in the
aftermath of Blacks not being able to acquire the land that they thought the
federal government was going to make available to them,” Grim says. “In the
case of the sharecropper, you did it so that you could get a share of the crop
which rarely was shared with Black people when all the cost of production had
taken place.”
Some Black people defeated the odds and managed to become landowners.
Most, however, had no land to pass on, which prevented them from accumulating
multi-generational wealth and left them largely under the control of Southern
white landowners.
The failed promise of “40 acres and a mule denied African Americans the
ability to generate financial self-sufficiency, which was needed in order to
resist as much as possible the Jim Crow policies of the local government in
the South,” Brooks says.
“It would have provided a very timely reparation for African Americans,
which would have changed the course of racial history. It would have changed
the trajectory of racial inequality in our society.”