40 acres and a mule refers to the short-lived policy, during the last stages of the American Civil War during 1865, of providing arable land to black former slaves who had become free as a result of the advance of the Union armies into the territory previously controlled by the Confederacy, particularly after Major General William Tecumseh Sherman's "March to the Sea." General Sherman's Special Field Orders, No. 15, issued on January 16, 1865, provided for the land, while some of its beneficiaries also received mules from the Army, for use in plowing.
The Special Field Orders issued by Sherman were never intended to represent an official policy of the United States government with regards to all former slaves and were issued "throughout the campaign to assure the harmony of action in the area of operations." Sherman's orders specifically allocated "the islands from Charleston, south, the abandoned rice fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. Johns River, Florida." Brigadier General Rufus Saxton, an abolitionist from Massachusetts, was appointed by Sherman to oversee the settling of the freed slaves. By June 1865, about 10,000 freed slaves were settled on 400,000 acres (160,000 ha) in Georgia and South Carolina.
After the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, his successor, Andrew Johnson, revoked Sherman's Orders and returned the land to its previous white owners. Because of this, the phrase "40 acres and a mule" has come to represent the failure of Reconstruction policies in restoring to African Americans the fruits of their labor.
In testimony before Congress in 1871, “forty acres and a mule” was attribued to be a promise made to African-Americans by President Abraham Lincoln before he was killed.
Famous quotes containing the word acres:
“The same soil is good for men and for trees. A man’s health requires as many acres of meadow to his prospect as his farm does loads of muck.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)