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This page is mostly copied from Wikipedia:
wikipedia.org/wiki/Forty_acres_and_a_mule
There is a lengthy history of the settlement of former slaves.
and
In the Official Record:
This order of General Sherman is part of the
Official Records of the American Civil War
It can be found in Series I – Military Operations,
Volume XLVII, Part II, Pages 60–62.
The volume was published in 1895.
Congress passed the
Confiscation Act of 1861
allowing the Union Army to legitimately confiscate property during its conflict with the South. This law authorized the troops to seize rebel property, including land and slaves. In fact, it reflected the rapidly expanding reality of black refugee camps that had sprung up around the Union Army. These obvious manifestations of the "Negro Problem" sparked antagonism among many Union rank-and-file members, necessitating officer-led leadership.
According to Henry Louis Gates Jr.:
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.
Forty acres and a mule refers to a key part of Special Field Orders, No. 15 (series 1865), a wartime order proclaimed by Union general William Tecumseh Sherman on January 16, 1865, during the American Civil War, to allot land to some freed families, in plots of land no larger than 40 acres. Sherman later ordered the army to lend mules for the agrarian reform effort.
The field orders followed a series of conversations between Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton and Radical Republican abolitionists Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens following disruptions to the institution of slavery provoked by the American Civil War. They 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 formerly enslaved families and other black people then living in the area.
Many freed people believed, after being told by various political figures, that they had a right to own the land they had been forced to work as slaves and were eager to control their own property. Freed people widely expected to legally claim 40 acres of land. However, Abraham Lincoln's successor as president, Andrew Johnson, tried to reverse the intent of Sherman's wartime Order No. 15 and similar provisions included in the second
Freedmen's Bureau bills.
Some land redistribution occurred under military jurisdiction during the war and for a brief period thereafter. However, federal and state policy during the Reconstruction era emphasized wage labor, not land ownership, for black people. Almost all land allocated during the war was restored to its pre-war white owners. Several black communities did maintain control of their land, and some families obtained new land by homesteading.
Black land ownership increased markedly in Mississippi, particularly during the 19th century. The state had much undeveloped bottomland (low-lying alluvial land near a river) behind riverfront areas that had been cultivated before the war. Most black people acquired land through private transactions, with ownership peaking at 15 million acres (6.1 million hectares) or ~23,000 square miles in 1910, before an extended financial recession caused problems that resulted in the loss of property for many.
In the South, vagrancy laws had allowed the states to force free African Americans into labor and sometimes to sell them into slavery. Nevertheless, free African Americans across the country performed a variety of occupations, including a small number who owned and operated successful farms. Others settled in Upper Canada (now Southern Ontario), an endpoint of the Underground Railroad, and in Nova Scotia.
As legal slavery came to an end, white people did not agree on how freed slaves ought to be treated. Some maintained that the lands the freed slaves had farmed without compensation should be confiscated from their former owners and given to them. Others, fearing the "race"-mixing that allowing them to remain in the U.S. would inevitably bring about, wanted them sent "somewhere else". Plans for a colony of freed slaves began in 1801 when James Monroe asked President Thomas Jefferson to help create a penal colony for rebellious blacks.
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