Episode Details

The phrase 40 acres and a mule began as a concrete military order. Early in the war Benjamin Butler declared enslaved people who reached Fort Monroe contraband of war, and the Port Royal experiment on the South Carolina Sea Islands followed. By December 1864 William T. Sherman's march had brought about 10,000 refugees to Savannah. On January 12, 1865, Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton met 20 Black leaders, and spokesman Garrison Frazier, a 67-year-old former Baptist minister, told them their people needed land of their own. Four days later Special Field Orders No. 15 set aside coastal land from Charleston into Florida in plots of no more than 40 acres per family.

By June 1865 about 40,000 freed people had settled roughly 435,000 acres under General Rufus Saxton. The mule never appeared in the order; surplus Army mules were lent to the settlers. Andrew Johnson's amnesty in May 1865 restored property to pardoned Confederates, he forced O.O. Howard to replace Circular 13 with Circular 15, and soldiers evicted families who refused to leave. Sharecropping and debt took the place of ownership, though Black farmers owned about 15 million acres by 1910.

• The Grand Contraband Camp grew in the burned ruins of a nearby Virginia town.
• Garrison Frazier had bought freedom for himself and his wife for about $1,000.
• Freed people on Edisto Island petitioned the president that they could not forgive their former enslavers.
• Sharecroppers faced interest of 50 to 70 percent and vagrancy arrest if they tried to leave.
• Pigford v. Glickman and the H.R. 40 reparations study bill both invoke Sherman's order.