(RECONSTRUCTION.) Order Organizing Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. 3 printed pages, 7¼ x 5 inches, on one folding sheet; vertical fold, staple holes in inner margin. Washington, 12 May 1865
The official military order authorizing the distribution of up to 40 acres to freedmen. No mules included here--that had been a separate initiative under General Sherman.
This is the War Department's General Orders No. 91, forwarding the recently enacted "Act to Establish a Bureau for the Relief of Freedmen and Refugees," and announcing President Johnson's appointment of General O.O. Howard as the head of the new bureau.
The act reads in part: "The Commissioner . . . shall have the authority to set apart, for the use of loyal refugees and freedmen, such tracts of land within the insurrectionary States . . . not more than forty acres of such land," with option to purchase after three years.
President Johnson granted amnesty to most ex-Confederates, making very little land available for distribution under the act. "Not more than forty acres," in this case, usually meant "zero."
