We’ve all heard the story of the “40 acres and a mule” promise to former slaves. It’s a staple of black history lessons, and it’s the name of Spike Lee’s film company. The promise was the first systematic attempt to provide a form of reparations to newly freed slaves, and it was astonishingly radical for its time, proto-socialist in its implications. In fact, such a policy would be radical in any country today: the federal government’s massive confiscation of private property — some 400,000 acres — formerly owned by Confederate land owners, and its methodical redistribution to former black slaves. What most of us haven’t heard is that the idea really was generated by black leaders themselves.
It is difficult to stress adequately how revolutionary this idea was: As the historian Eric Foner puts it in his book, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, “Here in coastal South Carolina and Georgia, the prospect beckoned of a transformation of Southern society more radical even than the end of slavery.” Try to imagine how profoundly different the history of race relations in the United States would have been had this policy been implemented and enforced; had the former slaves actually had access to the ownership of land, of property; if they had had a chance to be self-sufficient economically, to build, accrue and pass on wealth. After all, one of the principal promises of America was the possibility of average people being able to own land, and all that such ownership entailed. As we know all too well, this promise was not to be realized for the overwhelming majority of the nation’s former slaves, who numbered about 3.9 million.
What Exactly Was Promised?
General William Tecumseh Sherman in May 1865. Portrait by Mathew Brady.
We have been taught in school that the source of the policy of “40 acres and a mule” was Union General William T. Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15, issued on Jan. 16, 1865. (That account is half-right: Sherman prescribed the 40 acres in that Order, but not the mule. The mule would come later.) But what many accounts leave out is that this idea for massive land redistribution actually was the result of a discussion that Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton held four days before Sherman issued the Order, with 20 leaders of the black community in Savannah, Ga., where Sherman was headquartered following his famous March to the Sea. The meeting was unprecedented in American history.
Today, we commonly use the phrase “40 acres and a mule,” but few of us have read the Order itself. Three of its parts are relevant here. Section one bears repeating in full: “The islands from Charleston, south, the abandoned rice fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. Johns river, Florida, are reserved and set apart for the settlement of the negroes [sic] now made free by the acts of war and the proclamation of the President of the United States.”
Section two specifies that these new communities, moreover, would be governed entirely by black people themselves: ” … on the islands, and in the settlements hereafter to be established, no white person whatever, unless military officers and soldiers detailed for duty, will be permitted to reside; and the sole and exclusive management of affairs will be left to the freed people themselves … By the laws of war, and orders of the President of the United States, the negro [sic] is free and must be dealt with as such.”
Finally, section three specifies the allocation of land: ” … each family shall have a plot of not more than (40) acres of tillable ground, and when it borders on some water channel, with not more than 800 feet water front, in the possession of which land the military authorities will afford them protection, until such time as they can protect themselves, or until Congress shall regulate their title.”
With this Order, 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 thirty miles in from the coast,” as Barton Myers reports — would be redistributed to the newly freed slaves. The extent of this Order and its larger implications are mind-boggling, actually.
Who Came Up With the Idea?
Here’s how this radical proposal — which must have completely blown the minds of the rebel Confederates — actually came about. The abolitionists Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens and other Radical Republicans had been actively advocating land redistribution “to break the back of Southern slaveholders’ power,” as Myers observed. But Sherman’s plan only took shape after the meeting that he and Stanton held with those black ministers, at 8:00 p.m., Jan. 12, on the second floor of Charles Green’s mansion on Savannah’s Macon Street. In its broadest strokes, “40 acres and a mule” was their idea.
Stanton, aware of the great historical significance of the meeting, presented Henry Ward Beecher (Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous brother) a verbatim transcript of the discussion, which Beecher read to his congregation at New York’s Plymouth Church and which the New York Daily Tribune printed in full in its Feb. 13, 1865, edition. Stanton told Beecher that “for the first time in the history of this nation, the representatives of the government had gone to these poor debased people to ask them what they wanted for themselves.” Stanton had suggested to Sherman that they gather “the leaders of the local Negro community” and ask them something no one else had apparently thought to ask: “What do you want for your own people” following the war? And what they wanted astonishes us even today.
Who were these 20 thoughtful leaders who exhibited such foresight? They were all ministers, mostly Baptist and Methodist. Most curious of all to me is that 11 of the 20 had been born free in slave states, of which 10 had lived as free men in the Confederacy during the course of the Civil War. (The other one, a man named James Lynch, was born free in Maryland, a slave state, and had only moved to the South two years before.) The other nine ministers had been slaves in the South who became “contraband,” and hence free, only because of the Emancipation Proclamation, when Union forces liberated them.
Their chosen leader and spokesman was a Baptist minister named Garrison Frazier, aged 67, who had been born in Granville, N.C., and was a slave until 1857, “when he purchased freedom for himself and wife for $1000 in gold and silver,” as the New York Daily Tribune reported. Rev. Frazier had been “in the ministry for thirty-five years,” and it was he who bore the responsibility of answering the 12 questions that Sherman and Stanton put to the group. The stakes for the future of the Negro people were high.
And Frazier and his brothers did not disappoint. What did they tell Sherman and Stanton that the Negro most wanted? Land! “The way we can best take care of ourselves,” Rev. Frazier began his answer to the crucial third question, “is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor … and we can soon maintain ourselves and have something to spare … We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own.” And when asked next where the freed slaves “would rather live — whether scattered among the whites or in colonies by themselves,” without missing a beat, Brother Frazier (as the transcript calls him) replied that “I would prefer to live by ourselves, for there is a prejudice against us in the South that will take years to get over … ” When polled individually around the table, all but one — James Lynch, 26, the man who had moved south from Baltimore — said that they agreed with Frazier. Four days later, Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, after President Lincoln approved it.
What Became of the Land That Was Promised?
The response to the Order was immediate. When the transcript of the meeting was reprinted in the black publication Christian Recorder, an editorial note intoned that “From this it will be seen that the colored people down South are not so dumb as many suppose them to be,” reflecting North-South, slave-free black class tensions that continued well into the modern civil rights movement. The effect throughout the South was electric: As Eric Foner explains, “the freedmen hastened to take advantage of the Order.” Baptist minister Ulysses L. Houston, one of the group that had met with Sherman, led 1,000 blacks to Skidaway Island, Ga., where they established a self-governing community with Houston as the “black governor.” And by June, “40,000 freedmen had been settled on 400,000 acres of ‘Sherman Land.’ ” By the way, Sherman later ordered that the army could lend the new settlers mules; hence the phrase, “40 acres and a mule.”
And what happened to this astonishingly visionary program, which would have fundamentally altered the course of American race relations? Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor and a sympathizer with the South, overturned the Order in the fall of 1865, and, as Barton Myers sadly concludes, “returned the land along the South Carolina, Georgia and Florida coasts to the planters who had originally owned it” — to the very people who had declared war on the United States of America.
Fifty of the 100 Amazing Facts will be published on The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross website. Read all 100 Facts on The Root.
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Uh huh. Honky tried. Write another one. Scale it up, scale down. Just generations of Barbara Bush-wipe Daddy Dearest Butt-licker claims that as a former president's rich wife? Her collecting Social Security was an emblem everyone should admire. GOD DAMN right bitch. Why her bastard is such a brilliant painter is they're DEPOSITING THEMSELVES IN THEIR OWN DUMP.
Bezos' newspaper attacks Hillary Clinton for reiterating the truth about the fraudulent idiot's _ullshi_. Bezos' newspaper running straight story in February of the 2016 election year. Get it? Russians don't have to buy elections if Wall Street's satellite idiot Bezos owns the news. No one had to talk to Trump. They all know they're of the same idiot persuasion as where that's where their confidences LIE! LIE! LIE! The Bushes and the military-industrial complex: George H. Walker and Samuel Prescott Bush were the dynasty’s founding fathers during the years of and after World War I. Walker, a St. Louis financier, made his mark in corporate reorganizations and war contracts. By 1919, he was enlisted by railroad heir W. Averell Harriman to be president of Wall Street-based WA Harriman, which invested in oil, shipping, aviation and manganese, partly in Russia and Germany, during the 1920s. Sam Bush, the current president’s other great-grandfather, ran an Ohio company, Buckeye Steel Castings, that produced armaments. In 1917, he went to Washington to head the small arms, ammunition and ordnance section of the federal War Industries Board. Both men were present at the emergence of what became the U.S. military-industrial complex.
Prescott Bush, the Connecticut senator and grandfather of the current president, had some German corporate ties at the outbreak of World War II, but the better yardstick of his connections was his directorships of companies involved in U.S. war production. Dresser Industries, for example, produced the incendiary bombs dropped on Tokyo and made gaseous diffusion pumps for the atomic bomb project. George H.W. Bush later worked for Dresser’s oil-services businesses. Then, as CIA director, vice president and president, one of his priorities was the U.S. weapons trade and secret arms deals with Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the moujahedeen in Afghanistan.
In his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about how “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” That complex’s recent mega-leap to power came under George H.W. Bush and even more under George W. Bush -- with the post-9/11 expansion of the military and creation of the Department of Homeland Security. But armaments and arms deals seem to have been in the Bushes’ blood for nearly a century.
These are the people saying socialism can't modify capitalism so they save their own Stalinist vision of resenting wealth ruining the world. And had better than a Congressional Health Plan! That does not cover souls either in case Legislatures around the world are curious. MODI you misrepresenting INDIA, ignorant stand, on a theme in ruining inclusion with prejudice JUST LIKE THE GOD DAMNED West. GOD DAMNED WEST everyone's trained to hate for the spies elite GOD DAMNED peasant heads of idolizing just their own petty abominations.
NO ELECTRIC CHARGE AT EVERY FILLING STATION? Fooling anyone should no longer happen if we can get realistic. Yet car commercials promise futures of illusory not not enough. ALL WHILE the world's smothered in gas engines that should be electric.
Because NEW TECHNOLOGY should really have been added all along to decrease dependency on ruining our ECONOMIES and planet claiming money runs on just tanks of gas. Societal relationships based on the desires of people floating the world's responsibilities on their huge amounts of withheld for their own sake - cash. Burning Bushes and sycophants who never cared about the rest of us? Not quite.Children of ruthless framed visibly see their earthly reward constructed deserving just from the score. When blood money's blood money. Imagine Africa's score?
These idiots, De Santis etc.s idols of republican mirth in their entire Court Fool Orchestra attire, and waiting for mommy Bush-buttlicker to tie their shoes. Not how children participate incasing themselves adulthood. Everything's Parenting. ...
These screamers of higher pricing illusion. From the rafters and throughout their bought out halls of commerce like WallMartandUber where labors subsidized by the public dole. China's bottom layer stagnates. America too. While not illegal perhaps, after a fashion. Unethical this OH NO! NOW we admit money's disappearing we disappear. Gone! Gone now, when shredded for generations?
Because BIG-OIL's just pollution unaddressed, in whatever its misuse has gotten for us. A regime in Nigeria that kills Ken Saro-Wiwa from the convenience the world relies on forgiving themselves for killing and it's just a GOD DAMNED MESS. OH HELL. There you ... and so it goes ... Why not the next PLATFORM IDEA, for when the time's upon us. That when Kamala Harris occupies the US Democratic Party Presidential Candidacy, with good enough Cornell West Cabinet Post proposalt. Not Biden stepping aside. But relieved of the necessity to just stand up against the Republican National Party Idiots, designated at history's plate, as the throw comes home,
$10,000 for every Black Person in the United States of America. There are many Africans here now relegated again to the lower economic sphere and this is necessary to not deny the cyclical nature of both our problems and our outright GOD damned sins.
So my idea in the $10,000, is it is a business loan. A business loan from which dedicated advisors are assigned to advise. Those whose $10,000 investment disappears, are eligible for another $10,000. At least the money's diffusing in society some before hovered to the top as Uncle Ronnie failed to admit to the country is their inherent problem exposed as so GOD damned bad they had to pay each other a lot of money to hide from the fact, AMERICANS ARE NOT GOD DAMNED READING and taking responsibility to know what they're actually voting for in all this imagery that hits them like flyswatters when all that's necessary is ignore a bunch of gnats. Most designed retiring home in diseased ease.
June 11, 2023 Senate Responsible For Not Reversing United States Senate IMPEACHMENT Verdict So? Here we are where those of us responsible for the nonsense are running around still paying each other dreamily to scheme for the right to dig out the world because they like forgiving themselves for ruining the world so it's utter nonsense. Congestion Pricing an issue when the PUBLIC needs it understood what's wrong was ruined over a century and needs reversing. Bad people made sure your Florida vacations are not luxurious, but full of the foible about where to put the car and the deep resentmentnowinstilled in Americans for what liars profess none of us can be responsible for. But known generations. I made films etc. Professors write. And idiots want science not even understood and you know cheated near enough like the Bushes Roger Stone Peacock Parade to become President of our country and biggest mistake ever there's no doubt. Though history's full of the vagaries at how everyone ws involved using each other. JEWS not allowed in before, during or after World War twoo was an abomination and remains as the world's confused thinking racial resentment's an answer when just a fuse of a clue to our improvements. Amen.
