User talk:TangO PromO

40 acres and a mule was a practice in 1865 of providing arable land to Black former slaves who became free as Union armies occupied areas of the Confederacy, especially in Sherman's March. Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman's January 16, 1865 Special Field Orders, No. 15[1] provided for the land, and some of the recipients received from the Army mules for use in plowing as well;[2] the combination was widely recognized as providing a sound start for a family farm.

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".

After the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, his successor, Andrew Johnson, revoked Sherman's Orders. It is sometimes mistakenly claimed that Johnson also vetoed the enactment of the policy as a federal statute (introduced as U.S. Senate Bill 60). In fact, the Freedmen's Bureau Bill which he vetoed made no mention of grants of land or mules. (Another version of the Freedmen's bill, also without the land grants, was later passed after Johnson's second veto was overridden.) However, the Special Field Orders, also known as operational orders issued by Sherman were never intended to function as the official policy of the United States in application to all slaves, and were issued "throughout the campaign to assure the harmony of action in the area of operations".[3]

By June 1865, around 10,000[citation needed] freed slaves were settled on 400,000 acres (160,000 ha) in Georgia and South Carolina. Soon after, President Andrew Johnson reversed the order and returned the land to its white former owners. Because of this, the phrase has come to represent the failure of Reconstruction and the general public to return to African Americans the fruit of their labors.

40 acres (16 hectares) is a standard size for rural land, being a sixteenth of a section (square mile), or a quarter quarter-section, under the Public Land Survey System used on land settled after 1785.