Union General William T. Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, which set aside a strip of coastal land from Charleston, South Carolina, to the St. John’s River in Florida — including abandoned rice plantations and islands — exclusively for settlement by Black families. The order promised that “each family shall have a plot of not more than forty acres of tillable ground,” marking the origin of the phrase “forty acres and a mule.” Though short-lived, the order represented one of the first attempts at land redistribution to formerly enslaved African Americans.
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