William T. Sherman: Special Field Order No. 15

Impact

Despite the assertion in Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15 that freedpeople would be granted “possessory” titles to land, the land provision in the March 1865 Freedmen’s Bureau Act made clear that the freedpeople could occupy and rent—but not receive as reparation—up to forty acres of abandoned and occupied land for three years. The refugees could purchase the land based on whatever titles could be provided. In June 1865, General Saxton reported that approximately forty thousand blacks had settled on about 485,000 acres of land. The Freedmen’s Bureau then controlled approximately 858,000 acres of land—only roughly 1 percent of the land in the Confederacy.

Sherman’s linguistic vagueness encouraged contemporary blacks and their white friends to believe that the government would ultimately grant the freedpeople the land they occupied. But two essential factors—the ambiguity of Sherman’s reference to “possessory” titles and President Andrew Johnson’s insistence in September 1865 that confiscated land in the Sherman Reserve (except that sold under a court decree) be restored to pardoned former Confederates—undercut all but the symbolic meaning of Sherman’s order. Indeed, not surprisingly, Sherman’s murky language left contemporary white southerners hopeful of reclaiming their land, through legal action if necessary. In 1866 the process of restoring land to white claimants began, as the freedpeople proved unsuccessful in providing valid “possessory titles” in line with the wording of Sherman’s order. On January 31, 1866, the Freedmen’s Bureau held only about 464,000 acres of land; by February 1866, bureau officials had already restored 393,000 acres to whites who had received presidential pardons and had successfully proved prior ownership.

Thus, few of the freedpeople who claimed farms in the Sherman Reserve were ultimately allowed to retain their land. Upon General Saxton fell the burden of informing the freedpeople that they would have to surrender the land they occupied. According to the general, by reneging on its promise to distribute land to the freedpeople, the government was violating a solemn pledge. He observed that the former slaves’ “love of the soil and desire to own farms amounts to a passion—it appears to be the dearest hope of their lives.” For his part, in February 1866 Sherman informed the president,

I knew of course we could not convey title to land and merely provided ‘possessory titles’ to be good so long as war and our Military Power lasted. I merely aimed to make provision for the negroes who were absolutely dependent on us, leaving the value of their possessions to be determined by after events or legislation.

In his postwar memoirs Sherman recalled that

the military authorities at that day … had a perfect right to grant the possession of any vacant land to which they could extend military protection, but we did not undertake to give a fee-simple title; and all that was designed by these special field orders was to make temporary provisions for the freedmen and their families during the rest of the war, or until Congress should take action in the premises.

Sherman added that Stanton approved his field order before he announced it. As W. E. B. Du Bois lamented in 1935, Sherman thus had literally given the freedpeople on the Sherman Reserve “only possessory titles, and in the end, the government broke its implied promise and drove them off the land.”

Two later pieces of Reconstruction-era legislation continued the “implied promise” of government land grants and complicated understanding of Sherman’s field order for generations. First, the Southern Homestead Act of June 1866 set aside public land in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi for purchase by freedpeople for a five-dollar fee. The available land, however, was generally of inferior quality, and freedmen lacked sufficient capital to purchase implements and to farm the land properly. When Congress repealed the act in 1876, blacks had cultivated only several thousand acres, mostly in Florida. Second, the July 1866 Freedmen’s Bureau Act essentially authorized the government to lease, though not grant outright, twenty-acre lots on government-controlled lands with a six-year option to buy the land. Only some fourteen hundred persons took advantage of this option. By August 1868 the Freedmen’s Bureau controlled less than 140,000 acres of land. At best, then, the federal government’s Reconstruction-era land policy amounted to an opportunity for former slaves to lease family farms with the later option to buy the property.

In the end, for all of the controversy Sherman’s field order generated, it resulted in frightfully little land distributed to freedpeople. In November 1867, General Oliver O. Howard reported that 1,980 heads of families in Beaufort, South Carolina, had paid the government $31,000 for 19,040 acres. Many blacks who settled on their forty acres refused to surrender their claims to the white landowners and ultimately were removed forcibly by the Freedmen’s Bureau and the army. Others squatted on marginal land, determined to scratch out a living on unimproved soil. Most black refugees on the Sherman Reserve surrendered their claims and moved elsewhere to work on shares or as tenants on land owned by whites. Writing in 1893, a former missionary to the freedpeople, Elizabeth Hyde Botume, recalled that the freed slaves “regarded the return of the former owners as an inauguration of the old slavery times, with the worst consequences.”

Ever since Reconstruction, misreadings and distortions of Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15 by historians and polemicists have fueled demands for reparations by African Americans and their white allies. Repeatedly and erroneously, reparationists have cited Sherman’s order as the origin of the U.S. government’s alleged promise of “forty acres and a mule.” In fact, Sherman’s order was never intended to award land to the freedpeople. At best it was the general’s short-term strategy to alleviate what he considered the military problem of dealing with the burden of thousands of freedpeople in his army’s midst.

Confusion over the awarding of “land for the freedmen” continues today. Proponents of reparations maintain that the government reneged on its wartime pledge to compensate the former slaves for their centuries of bondage with land and animals. Many persons still believe that the so-called promise of “forty acres and a mule” justifies African Americans’ appeals for a broad range of compensation—from cash payments to tax credits—for the descendants of America’s four million black slaves. They point to Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15 and “forty acres and a mule” as symbols of the government’s broken promises and the freed slaves’ shattered dreams.