William T. Sherman: Special Field Order No. 15

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Despite Sherman’s antipathy toward blacks and their rights, his Special Field Order No. 15 represented an overarching, positive, and radical step toward settling the freedpeople on abandoned plantation lands. Ironically, as Gerteis explains, “the most thoroughgoing program for blacks” along coastal South Carolina and Georgia “came not from Radicals or self-proclaimed friends of the freedmen, but from … Sherman, a battlefield general with an ill-concealed distaste for blacks and for those laboring among them.” The scholar Paul Cimbala explains that Sherman, “no philanthropist or reformer, was primarily concerned with pursuing Confederates into South Carolina. He needed to rid his army of the thousands of slaves who had marched along in its train.” A third historian, John Syrett, maintains that although Sherman issued the field orders, “Stanton and Saxton were doubtless chiefly responsible for their content.” Regardless, the order incorporated a multitiered solution to solving what Sherman judged a “Negro problem” resulting from emancipation.

From Sherman’s perspective, the resettlement of the freedpeople on abandoned plantations offered several advantages. First, so doing would free his army from what he considered the logistical annoyance posed by the thousands of black refugees burdening his troops and crowding along the southeastern Atlantic coast. Second, allowing the freedpeople to occupy abandoned plantations would shift the cost of supporting the newly free men and women from the federal government to their former masters. Third, settling the freedpeople on coastal land would render them (and U.S. forces) less vulnerable to attacks by Confederate cavalry and guerrillas. Finally, a positive, fostering program for the freedpeople would serve to assuage Sherman’s critics on the race question. While Sherman was no doubt influenced by pressure from Chase, Stanton, and black leaders to accommodate the freedpeople, his special order stemmed largely from his determination to liberate himself from dealing with the freedpeople, which he considered a military necessity. Accordingly, in the order of January 16, Sherman opens by declaring in clause I that the Sea Island region, extending from Charleston, South Carolina, south to the Saint Johns River in northern Florida, and the coastal lands thirty miles inland along rivers were to be reserved solely for African American settlers. Thousands of acres of additional abandoned land would thus be available to black refugees.

Clause II reserved exclusively for people of color the Sea Islands between Charleston and Jacksonville as well as other settlements carved out in the newly established reservation. Sherman’s order also specified that blacks would manage their own affairs in their communities, subject only to the army and the U.S. Congress. This clause underscored the blacks’ freedom and stated that the freedmen could not be coerced into military units without specific orders from the president or congress. Nevertheless, Sherman’s field order stated that young freedmen were to be encouraged to enlist in units of the U.S. Colored Troops and receive bounties upon enlistment.

In clause III, Sherman articulated the process by which freedmen could settle and establish agricultural operations. In order to do so, “three respectable negroes, heads of families” would petition government officials for a license and then subdivide the land in plots no larger than forty acres of tillable ground and, if bounding water, no more than eight hundred feet of waterfront. Precedent for the forty-acre limitation stemmed from President Lincoln’s directive of December 31, 1863, to South Carolina’s Direct Tax Commission. The military would protect the freedmen, if necessary, until they could protect themselves and until Congress would legitimize their land titles. The military also would make ships available to the freedmen to assist them in supplying themselves and selling their crops.

Clause IV stated that families of men serving in the U.S. Colored Troops, aboard gunboats, or engaged in commercial fishing or as pilots could settle on plots in the Sherman reservation. According to the fifth clause of the special field order, the blacks were to receive temporary “possessory” title to the abandoned land until the government could uphold their permanent ownership of the land. Clause VI appointed General Saxton to oversee the blacks’ settlement of what became known as the Sherman Reserve.