President Johnson reversed the land promise and returned property to former enslavers within months

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. And so died the promise of that January 12 meeting, along with black self-determination and wealth building. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 20

Categorization

• XREF: This revocation is the pivotal causal event of the whole case — a broken government promise whose reversal must anchor the reparations argument.
• DEEPTHINKING: The rupture — a government extending then revoking title within eight months — is the template for the saturated-system claim: the state itself created and then stripped black wealth.