President Johnson reversed Sherman’s land order and returned freedmen’s land to former enslavers.

Evidence

On March 3, 1865, Congress established the Freedmen’s Bureau in the War Department, in order to administer the field order and assign legal title to the forty-acre plots. On April 15, 1865, less than a week after the Confederate Army surrendered at Appomattox, John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Lincoln. In his place, Vice President Andrew Johnson assumed the presidency. By the fall of 1865, President Johnson had reversed Sherman’s order and returned the land to the former enslavers. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 20

Categorization

• XREF: Anchors the ‘forty acres’ promise in specific dates and actors — usable as a factual foundation for the reparations legal brief; connects to any prior treatment of the Freedmen’s Bureau and Reconstruction.