William T. Sherman: Special Field Order No. 15

Audience

Sherman’s field order held foremost significance to the freedpeople along the coast who hoped that freedom would translate into land ownership and more than the right to labor for others. Like the freed black men and women, Radical Republicans, former abolitionists, and sympathetic military commanders interpreted the general’s field order, followed by the land provisions of the 1865 Freedmen’s Bureau Act and the 1866 Southern Homestead Act, as confiscating the rich estates of former rebels and redistributing them to their former slaves. The New York Tribune, however, a supporter of emancipation, opposed Sherman’s edict based on the fact that it segregated blacks from whites. Southern whites uniformly condemned Sherman’s order and sought to reclaim their property through legal means. In the years since Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, black activists from W. E. B. Du Bois to contemporary reparationists have identified the order as a promise of “forty acres and a mule”—their rallying cry for compensation for their ancestors’ centuries of bondage and institutionalized degradation.