Land redistribution for freedmen was proposed but only applied to Native American allies.

Evidence

In September 1865, Pennsylvania congressman Thaddeus Stevens, arguably the most antiracist of the “Radical Republicans” favoring civil rights, proposed (and did not get approval for) the redistribution of the 400 million acres held by the wealthiest 10 percent of southerners. Every adult freedman would be granted forty acres, and the remaining 90 percent of the total would be sold in plots to the “highest bidder” to pay for the war and retire the national debt. Congress forced only one group of slaveholders to provide land to their former captives—the Confederacy’s Native American allies. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 631

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why did Congress force only the Confederacy’s Native American allies to give land to former captives? Worth chasing the specific rationale — possibly because they were seen as a discrete defeated group without political protection.
• XREF: The failed forty-acres-and-a-mule redistribution feeds directly into the ‘Grafting & Growth’ article’s theme of land as material basis of freedom — here the denial of land to freedmen as the material floor of Reconstruction’s failure.