Forty Acres and a Mule

“Forty acres and a mule” was the refrain heard and repeated during and after the Civil War when Africans were expecting a redistribution of land. This came about because on January 15, 1865, the American government passed Special Field Orders No. 15, which when they were executed immediately thereafter allowed General W. T. Sherman to give abandoned land in Charleston, Beaufort, Hilton Head, Savannah, Fernandina, St. Augustine, and Jacksonville to African people in the United States. These orders were passed 5 months before the end of the Civil War. Then, on May 26, 1865, when the fighting between the North and the South ceased, all legislation passed during the war, including these orders, were declared null and void. The land that Sherman, with the cooperation of the Freedman's Bureau, had been able to allocate to African people was taken back and redistributed to Southern plantation owners by President Andrew Johnson. Thus the idea of 40 acres and a mule became one of many empty and broken promises made by the American government to African people in America.

Dr. John Hope Franklin, historian, intellectual, organizer

Special Field Orders No. 15 designated 40-acre sections of “tillable land” in Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina to be used exclusively by African people in the United States. African people were the only ones allowed to reside in these 40-acre sections and were under no rule except that of the U.S. Congress and military. Under Special Field Orders No. 15, African people could not be conscripted into the military, even though African men were highly encouraged to enlist “as soldiers in the service of the United States, to contribute their share towards maintaining their own freedom.” Sherman appointed General R. Saxton the Inspector of Settlements and Plantations to oversee the division and acquisitions of the designated land and land titles. Due to the large job at hand, T. W. Osborne and Davis Tilson were also recruited a few months later to help Saxton in distributing the confiscated land. Although there was no specific mention of the allocation of mules, with Sherman's permission, the army was to loan out mules and horses seized during the war to those who settled in these designated areas. It is said that over 40,000 African men and women had been given an accumulation of 400,000 acres of land under these orders (at 10 acres a person), opening the door for the debate on whether 40 acres and a mule was to be per family, per person, or for African men only. Regardless of the logistics, these numbers were really representative of the collaborative efforts of the Freedman's Bureau and [Page 250]Sherman, as Sherman alone was never able to execute these orders in the way he wanted to because when the Civil War ended he lost some of his power.

On March 3, 1865, Congress created The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, also known as the Freedman's Bureau, to follow Sherman's lead and rent out 40-acre plots of land to African people. This land came with the promise that it could eventually be bought. The Freedman's Bureau controlled over 800,000 acres of abandoned and confiscated land throughout the Southern confederate states, the states bordering the confederate states, the District of Columbia, and territory occupied by Native Americans. On May 25, 1865, a month after Lincoln's assassination, Johnson stated that these plots of land needed to be taken back and redistributed to the whites who owned them before the war. The former plantation owners knew that owning land enabled economic power and stability, and they therefore pressured Johnson to take back the land from African people as quickly as possible. Many African people who rented and owned these lands violently resisted because they knew that this land belonged to them and that they were entitled to it. Despite their efforts, the land was still stolen back by the government.

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