Sherman's Christmas Gift and the Broken Promise

On January twelfth, eighteen sixty-five, General William Tecumseh Sherman sat down at the Green-Meldrim House in Savannah with twenty Black ministers representing the freed people of coastal Georgia and South Carolina. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton was also present. Sherman asked the ministers a direct question: what did freedom require?

The ministers had chosen a spokesman, a sixty-seven-year-old Baptist minister named Garrison Frazier who had purchased his own freedom and his wife's freedom eight years earlier for a thousand dollars in gold and silver. Frazier's answer was recorded: "The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn it, and till it by our own labor."

Four days later, Sherman issued Special Field Orders Number Fifteen. The order set aside the Sea Islands from Charleston south to the Saint John's River in Florida, and all abandoned plantation land thirty miles inland from the coast, for exclusive settlement by formerly enslaved families. Each family would receive forty acres. A footnote in the order mentioned that the Army might lend mules. Forty acres and a mule: the phrase entered American English from that footnote.

By the summer of eighteen sixty-five, approximately forty thousand formerly enslaved people had settled on this land in family plots. They cleared it. They planted. They built structures. They established governance. They were, for those months, landowners.

President Andrew Johnson reversed the order in the fall of eighteen sixty-five. He returned the land to its former Confederate owners. The families who had settled it were told to negotiate labor contracts with those owners or leave. Most left. The land they had worked for months under a federal order was returned to the men who had owned them. The federal government took no further significant action on land redistribution. The wealth gap created by that reversal structured Black poverty in the Lowcountry for the following century.