40 Acres and a Lie

We compiled Reconstruction-era documents to identify 1,250 formerly enslaved Black Americans given land-only to have it returned to their enslavers.

- By Alexia Fernández Campbell, April Simpson, and Pratheek Rebala

Pompey Jackson was born in the heart of Georgia’s rice empire—the human property of one of the state’s wealthiest and most powerful families.

He and his sisters were among hundreds enslaved on a sprawling marshland estate called Grove Hill, where life was brutal. People died every month, mostly young children. Those who reached adulthood often suffered spinal injuries, lung disease, and foot rot from sloshing through flooded rice fields. Jackson survived smallpox. He was a teenager in late 1864 when Union General William T. Sherman and his soldiers advanced through the Ogeechee River low country on their way to capture Savannah.

Sherman freed thousands during his march through the South, later writing that “freedmen, in droves, old and young, followed [our troops] to reach a place of safety.” On January 16, 1865, at the urging of Savannah’s Black ministers, Sherman issued an edict called Special Field Orders, No. 15, which reserved large swaths of coastal South Carolina, Georgia, and northeastern Florida for the formerly enslaved to live and work on and govern themselves.

Sherman’s pledge of land for the formerly enslaved—which would become known as “40 Acres and a Mule”—remains the nation’s most famous attempt to provide some form of reparations for American slavery. Today, it is largely remembered as a broken promise and an abandoned step toward multiracial democracy. Less known is that the federal government actually did issue hundreds, perhaps thousands, of titles to specific plots of land between 4 and 40 acres—before ultimately changing course and returning the land to the plantation owners. (The freedmen were not, in fact, promised a mule, though some did receive them.)