The federal government repossessed land promised to freedmen and returned it to enslavers

Evidence

The most obvious hurdle for the newly freed was the reality that the end of slavery had left them without capital. They received no reparations for the end of slavery. The promises made by General Sherman were quickly dashed after President Lincoln’s assassination. President Andrew Johnson stopped the operation of Field Order No. 15, repossessed the forty acres of land given to newly freed black men, and returned it to their white former enslavers. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 265

Categorization

• XREF: This is the concrete broken-promise fact central to the reparations accounting argument — the direct federal seizure of freedmen’s property that the claim-of-accounting case will rest on.
• ADDENDUM: Land reclamation as a confiscated-asset harm parallels the graft/tamarix ‘infrastructure’ theme: freedmen were set up as independent economic actors then stripped of the capital base.