FORTY ACRES (MILITARY--CIVIL WAR.) SHERMAN, WILLIAM T. Special Field Order No 15. Headquarters Military Division of the Mississippi. 8vo sheet, printed on both sides; two neat punctures to the left margin, having been removed from a larger volume of orders. "In the Field," Savannah, GA, 16 January 1865
Sherman's Special Field Order Number 15 specifically stated: "By the laws of war and orders of the President of the United States, the Negro is free and must be dealt with as such." It continued: "Whenever three respectable Negroes, heads of families shall desire to settle on land, and shall have selected for that purpose an island or a locality clearly defined. . . each family shall have a plot of not more than forty (40) acres of tillable ground, and when it borders on some water channel, with not more than eight hundred feet front, in the possession of which land, the military authorities will afford them protection until such time that they can protect themselves, or until Congress shall regulate their title." The Freedman's Bureau Act provided for the confiscation of 400,000 acres of land along the Atlantic coast of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida and the dividing of it into parcels of not more than 40 acres, on which were to be settled approximately 18,000 freed slave families and other Blacks then living in the area. Word of this quickly spread among the newly freed slaves, most of whom interpreted it to mean exactly what it sounded like. But both this order and the Freedman's Bureau Act were reversed by Andrew Johnson who succeeded Lincoln, leaving literally tens of thousands of newly free blacks in a state of limbo, landless and jobless. This is treated with at length by W.E.B. Du Bois in his Black Reconstruction.
