Could the President Make Slavery ;ega; Again

We've all heard the story of the "twoscore acres and a mule" promise to former slaves. It's a staple of black history lessons, and information technology'south the proper name of Spike Lee's flick visitor. The promise was the first systematic attempt to provide a form of reparations to newly freed slaves, and it was astonishingly radical for its fourth dimension, proto-socialist in its implications. In fact, such a policy would be radical in any state today: the federal authorities's massive confiscation of private property — some 400,000 acres — formerly owned past Amalgamated state owners, and its methodical redistribution to former black slaves. What most of u.s. haven't heard is that the idea really was generated past black leaders themselves.

It is difficult to stress adequately howrevolutionary this thought was: As the historian Eric Foner puts it in his book,Reconstruction: America'south Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, "Here in coastal Due south Carolina and Georgia, the prospect beckoned of a transformation of Southern society more radical fifty-fifty than the stop of slavery." Try to imagine how profoundly unlike the history of race relations in the The states would have been had this policy been implemented and enforced; had the former slaves actually had access to the ownership of land, of property; if they had had a run a risk to be self-sufficient economically, to build, accumulate and pass onwealth.After all, one of the principal promises of America was the possibility of boilerplate people being able to ownland,and all that such buying entailed. As we know all too well, this hope was not to be realized for the overwhelming majority of the nation's one-time slaves, who numbered about iii.nine million.

What Exactly Was Promised?

Full general William Tecumseh Sherman in May 1865. Portrait past Mathew Brady.

We take been taught in school that the source of the policy of "xl acres and a mule" was Union Full general William T. Sherman's Special Field Order No. 15, issued on Jan. 16, 1865. (That account is half-right: Sherman prescribed the 40 acres in that Order, only not the mule. The mule would come later.) But what many accounts leave out is that this idea for massive state redistribution really was the result of a give-and-take that Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin Thousand. Stanton held four daysbefore Sherman issued the Society, with 20 leaders of the black community in Savannah, Ga., where Sherman was headquartered following his famous March to the Sea. The meeting was unprecedented in American history.

Today, nosotros unremarkably use the phrase "40 acres and a mule," but few of us accept read the Order itself. Three of its parts are relevant here. Department 1 bears repeating in full: "The islands from Charleston, south, the abandoned rice fields forth the rivers for thirty miles dorsum from the sea, and the land bordering the St. Johns river, Florida, are reserved and set apart for the settlement of the negroes [sic] now made free by the acts of war and the proclamation of the President of the United states."

Section two specifies that these new communities, moreover, would be governed entirely by blackness people themselves: " … on the islands, and in the settlements hereafter to be established, no white person whatever, unless military officers and soldiers detailed for duty, will be permitted to reside; and the sole and exclusive management of affairs will be left to the freed people themselves … Past the laws of war, and orders of the President of the United States, the negro [sic] is costless and must be dealt with equally such."

Finally, section three specifies the allotment of land: " … each family shall have a plot of not more than (xl) acres of tillable ground, and when it borders on some water channel, with non more than than 800 feet water front, in the possession of which state the military authorities will afford them protection, until such fourth dimension as they can protect themselves, or until Congress shall regulate their title."

With this Order,400,000 acres of state — "a strip of coastline stretching from Charleston, South Carolina, to the St. John's River in Florida, including Georgia's Sea Islands and the mainland thirty miles in from the coast," as Barton Myers reports — would exist redistributed to the newly freed slaves. The extent of this Club and its larger implications are mind-boggling, actually.

Who Came Upwardly With the Idea?

Here'southward how this radical proposal — which must have completely diddled the minds of the rebel Confederates — actually came about. The abolitionists Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens and other Radical Republicans had been actively advocating country redistribution "to suspension the back of Southern slaveholders' power," as Myers observed. But Sherman's plan only took shape afterward the coming together that he and Stanton held with those black ministers, at viii:00 p.m., January. 12, on the second floor of Charles Green's mansion on Savannah'southward Macon Street. In its broadest strokes, "40 acres and a mule" wastheir idea.

Stanton, aware of the great historical significance of the meeting, presented Henry Ward Beecher (Harriet Beecher Stowe's famous brother) a verbatim transcript of the discussion, which Beecher read to his congregation at New York'south Plymouth Church and which the New York Daily Tribune printed in full in its Feb. 13, 1865, edition. Stanton told Beecher that "for the offset fourth dimension in the history of this nation, the representatives of the government had gone to these poor debased people to ask them what they wanted for themselves." Stanton had suggested to Sherman that they assemble "the leaders of the local Negro community" and ask them something no one else had apparently idea to inquire: "What do yous want for your ain people" following the war? And what they wanted astonishes us even today.

Who were these 20 thoughtful leaders who exhibited such foresight? They were all ministers, more often than not Baptist and Methodist. Most curious of all to me is that11 of the xx had been borngratuitous in slave states, of which 10 had lived every bit free men in the Confederacy during the form of the Civil State of war. (The other one, a man named James Lynch, was built-in free in Maryland, a slave state, and had only moved to the South ii years before.) The other 9 ministers had been slaves in the S who became "contraband," and hence free, only because of the Emancipation Declaration, when Union forces liberated them.

Their called leader and spokesman was a Baptist minister named Garrison Frazier, aged 67, who had been born in Granville, N.C., and was a slave until 1857, "when he purchased liberty for himself and married woman for $thousand in gilded and silver," as the New York Daily Tribune reported. Rev. Frazier had been "in the ministry building for thirty-five years," and it was he who diameter the responsibleness of answering the 12 questions that Sherman and Stanton put to the grouping. The stakes for the hereafter of the Negro people were high.

And Frazier and his brothers did non disappoint. What did they tell Sherman and Stanton that the Negro most wanted?Land!"The fashion we tin best take intendance of ourselves," Rev. Frazier began his answer to the crucial third question, "is to have land, and plow it and till information technology by our own labor … and we tin can soon maintain ourselves and accept something to spare … We want to be placed on state until nosotros are able to buy it and brand it our own." And when asked next where the freed slaves "would rather alive — whether scattered among the whites or in colonies by themselves," without missing a crush, Brother Frazier (as the transcript calls him) replied that "I would prefer to live by ourselves, for there is a prejudice confronting united states in the South that will take years to get over … " When polled individually around the table, all but ane — James Lynch, 26, the homo who had moved south from Baltimore — said that they agreed with Frazier. Four days later, Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, later President Lincoln approved information technology.

What Became of the Land That Was Promised?

The response to the Order was firsthand. When the transcript of the meeting was reprinted in the black publication Christian Recorder, an editorial note intoned that "From this information technology volition be seen that the colored people downwardly South are not so impaired as many suppose them to exist," reflecting Northward-South, slave-free black grade tensions that continued well into the modern civil rights movement. The event throughout the South was electric: As Eric Foner explains, "the freedmen hastened to take advantage of the Lodge." Baptist government minister Ulysses L. Houston, 1 of the group that had met with Sherman, led ane,000 blacks to Skidaway Island, Ga., where they established a cocky-governing community with Houston equally the "blackness governor." And past June, "xl,000 freedmen had been settled on 400,000 acres of 'Sherman Land.' " Past the fashion, Sherman afterward ordered that the army could lend the new settlers mules; hence the phrase, "40 acres and a mule."

And what happened to this astonishingly visionary programme, which would have fundamentally altered the class of American race relations? Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's successor and a sympathizer with the S, overturned the Social club in the autumn of 1865, and, as Barton Myers sadly concludes, "returned the land along the S Carolina, Georgia and Florida coasts to the planters who had originally owned information technology" — to the very people who had declared war on the United States of America.

Fifty of the 100 Astonishing Facts will be published on The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cantankerous website. Read all 100 Facts onThe Root.

castrogung1937.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/the-truth-behind-40-acres-and-a-mule/

Share this post