Jan. 12, 1865
As the Civil War neared an end, Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton met with local Black leaders in Savannah, Georgia.
The Rev. Garrison Frazier, a 67-year-old imposing man, spoke for the group. Asked what slavery meant, he replied, “Slavery is, receiving by irresistible power the work of another man, and not by his consent.”
He told the Army leaders that they wanted to be free from the dominion of white men, wanted to be educated and wanted to own land they could work and earn a living.
Asked if they would rather live scattered among the whites or in colonies by yourselves, Frazier replied, “I would prefer to live by ourselves, for there is a prejudice against us in the South that will take years to get over.”
In response, Sherman issued Special Field Order 15, giving each freed family 40 acres of land along the Atlantic Coast. “The effect throughout the South was electric,” wrote historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., with freedmen settling on 400,000 acres of “Sherman Land.”
Some also received mules left over from the battles, leading to the phrase “40 acres and a mule.”
After President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, President Andrew Johnson took over, reversing Field Order 15 and smashing the dreams of Black Americans who had finally been freed.
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