Sherman’s Field Order 15 was born of military expediency, not racial conscience

Evidence

Four days later, Sherman issued Special Field Order 15, providing for the distribution of hundreds of thousands of acres of former Confederate land in forty-acre tracts to newly freed people along coastal South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. This became known as “forty acres and a mule.” “Sherman was neither a humanitarian reformer nor a man with any particular concern for Blacks,” Eric Foner writes in his groundbreaking book Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution. “Instead of seeing Field Order 15 as a blueprint for the transformation of Southern society, he viewed it mainly as a way of relieving the immediate pressure caused by the large number of impoverished Blacks following his army.” And yet, Foner writes, the “prospect beckoned of a transformation of Southern society more radical even than the end of slavery.” One of the ministers at that meeting, Ulysses L. Houston, organized one thousand Black residents and claimed land in Skidaway Island, Georgia, where they founded a self-governing Black community. Some forty thousand freedpeople staked their claim to four hundred thousand acres of “Sherman land” in a region, Foner writes, “that had spawned one of the wealthiest segments of the planter class.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1341

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader project on historical controversy — Foner’s interpretation showing a founding act (forty acres) was never intended as a blueprint, only relief. Pairs with the ADDENDUM ‘On Sacrifice’ territory about what gets memorialized vs. what gets reframed.
• QUESTION: Why did Congress never legislate this into law during Lincoln’s lifetime, and did any serious legislative effort exist before Johnson’s overturn? Worth chasing.