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Essay on 40 Acres & a Mule
Forty Acres and a Mule is the primary conception of reparations for slavery came in the form of land. Throughout the final months of the Civil War, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman marched victoriously through Georgia to the sea, nearly unopposed by Confederate forces. Thousands of freed slaves (called freedmen) accompanied Sherman's forces. On March 3, 1865, just weeks before the end of the Civil War and almost a year prior to the ratification of the 13th Amendment the Freedmen's Bureau was created by Congress. Originally the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, the Freedmen's Bureau was responsible for, among other things, "the supervision and management of all abandoned lands the control of all subjects relating to refugees and freedmen from rebel States." General Sherman, with the approval of the War Department, issued Special Field Order No. 15 on January 16, 1865.
The order stated that "the islands of Charleston south, the abandoned rice fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering St. Johns River, Florida are reserved and set apart for the settlement of Negroes now made free by the acts of war and the proclamation of the President of the United States." Furthermore, Sherman's order specified freedmen would be offered assistance "to enable them to establish a peaceable agricultural settlement.
The land was separated into 40-acre tracts and Sherman distributed land titles to the head of each family of freedmen. He also ordered animals that were no longer useful to the military (mules and horses) to be distributed to each of the households. This is the origin of the phrase forty acres and a mule, which was promised to each freedman's family. By the summer of 1865, 40,000 freedmen had received 400,000 acres of abandoned Confederate land......
