“40 Acres & A Mule”
The phrase “forty acres and a mule” comes from Special Field Order No 15, issued on January 16th, 1865, by General William Tecumseh Sherman of the Union Army. Following the US Civil War, this order reserved plots, “not more than 40 acres”, of tillable coastal land for Black families in Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina. Sherman later agreed to lend these new settlers “mules” for agricultural land development. Sherman gave the order, but 20 Black abolitionist leaders in Georgia who for years advocated for freedom and repatriation - including land ownership - advised the US Army on this decision. They understood that land ownership was crucial for any community's social and economic growth within capitalism. Freedmen took to this new opportunity without hesitation, and by June of 1865, 40,000 freedmen settled on 400,000 acres of land allocated by the federal government. They formed self-governing communities on these lands, established cultural centers and businesses, and created practices that centered their new freedoms. The allocation of this land was considered a reparation, or an act of repair intended to pay for damage or injury unjustly inflicted during a war, or in this case, centuries of brutal enslavement and forced labor in the United States of America.
However, this act of reparation did not last long. Following Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, Andrew Johnson became the new president of the United States and quickly prioritized measures to reintegrate the former Confederacy into the Union with lenient penalties for those who committed treason and a swift regression of new Black rights. Less than a year after Sherman’s “40 Acres” order, President Johnson ordered all Black families to vacate these lands and return them to the former Confederate owners. This order forced thousands of Black people into homelessness, incarceration, work camps, and the other precarious, often violent, paths that Freedmen were forced into during the Reconstruction Era.
White Reparations
Former enslavers across the US received reparations from the government for their loss of human “property.” On April 16th, 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act, which freed enslaved people in Washington, D.C., and compensated their enslavers up to $300 for each freed person. Lincoln allocated $1 million from the U.S. treasury, amounting to about $12 billion today. Many states had similar compensation acts.
The federal government also made land available to White Americans through various Homestead Acts. Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act of 1862 into law during the US Civil War. This bill devastated Indigenous communities as it seized their ancestral lands, designated them as federal property, and then sold them or gave them away in the name of westward expansion to “any adult who had never taken up arms against the federal government of the United States”. In addition to White men, White women and White immigrants who had applied for citizenship were also eligible. Black families were eligible after the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment.
By the official end of the US Homestead Acts in 1976, the federal government granted 1.6 million homesteads and distributed 270 million acres of land: 10% of all the land in the United States. The Homestead Acts were some of the most expansive and distributive social welfare programs in US history, yet non-White Americans were consistently and specifically denied its benefits. Less than 6,000 of these 1.6 million homesteads went to Black families. In comparison, 1.5 million White applicants received homesteads. The average plot size was 160 acres, and in 2007 the National Parks Service estimated that 93 million descendants of homesteaders are still alive today.
The Freedmen’s Bureau
The Reconstruction Era is a period in US history from 1865-1870 often referred to by historians as “the second founding of the United States.” In 1865, Congress established the U.S. Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands to provide federal aid for formerly enslaved people transitioning from slavery to citizenship. This bureau, popularly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, intended to establish infrastructures to support the development of free Black communities. Despite poor funding and staffing, the Bureau created hospitals and shelters and provided food and medical assistance for more than a million Freedmen. One of its greatest accomplishments was the establishment of grade schools, historically Black colleges, and universities (such as Clark Atlanta University and Fisk University). However, despite these successes, new free Black communities – often called refugee camps – were stigmatized, heavily policed, popularly harassed, and repeatedly dismantled in the decades during and following the Reconstruction Era.
The Freedmen’s Bureau was short-lived under the direction of President Johnson. Johnson returned lands given to Black families to their former White owners without offering any new concessions or plans to support newly free Black people, thwarting the efforts of the Freedmen’s Bureau. The Johnson Administration also destroyed many federally maintained Freedmen’s communities and by 1872, following pressure from White southern leaders, Congress dismantled the Bureau, ultimately abandoning the few efforts made by the US government to protect and repatriate formerly enslaved people in the decades following the Civil War.
Reparations Now
The term “forty acres and a mule” - amongst other forms - now lives on in diasporic memories as the failure of the United States to make amends for the brutal conditions that Black Americans endured while pushing this country towards the democracy it now proudly celebrates. The phrase resonates across temporal atmospheres as a living memory, passed down through generations that remembers centuries of land injustice and the debt owed by the USA to Black and Indigenous people.
Despite these many obstacles, contemporary conversations concerning reparations persist nationwide. In California, economists advising the State’s reparations task force recommend payments of up to $1.2 million to Black Californians. A separate reparations committee in San Francisco attempted to address the long history of civic disenfranchisement and oppression against its Black residents by offering a one-time $5 million payment and other recommendations related to inequality in federal housing, employment, education, mass incarceration, and health systems.
The National African American Reparations Commission (NAARC), established in 2015, is a group of professionals “with outstanding accomplishments in the fields of law, medicine, journalism, academia, history, civil rights, and social justice advocacy” who created a 10-point reparations plan that includes acknowledgment, funds, generational wealth, and criminal justice reform. The 1619 Project is a long-form journalistic endeavor developed by Nikole Hannah-Jones, and many others to create publications, curriculums, and media meant to teach subjects of slavery, the founding of the USA and acknowledge some of the many false histories and mythologies popularly taught in our schools and public spaces.
There are countless other organizations, artists, activists, and individuals still fighting for and teaching Black freedom in the US and worldwide. While none of the committees or organizations mentioned have federal authority to implement their plans or recommendations, may we all continue to dream of an equitable world.
The 40 ACRES Archive
The 40 ACRES Archive lives at an ever-expanding intersection between archiving, art, education, historical research, community organizing, publication, public space interventions, map making, and contemporary gestures of repair. This multidisciplinary project centers Black history, with a specific focus on the US Reconstruction Era, as a way to understand the footprint of this period on today’s inequities, explain the immense lack of supportive federal infrastructures in the US, and develop generative paths forward as a community.
The 40 ACRES Archive looks back with a focus on marginalized histories that have been oppressed or omitted from official records and public memories. By relating to the Reconstruction Era—both regionally and nationally—and supporting events meant to tell these stories, we continue to build more honest insights into how many communities around the country collectively reconstructed themselves around specific models of White supremacy after the Civil War, and repeatedly forestalled the advancement of communities of color, resulting in the many socioeconomic inequalities we currently live within.
The 40 ACRES Archive is devoted to the care of intersectional histories and, while centered in Black history, works to support the amplification of Indigenous, Pre-Colonial, Global South, and other Non-White American experiences. By researching these marginalized histories and connecting them to national narratives, we hope to contribute to popular understandings that include the many hands—colors, creeds, and genders—involved in shaping this country we now share.
The 40 ACRES Archive, established in 2021, is led by Sandy Williams IV, an artist and Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Richmond. To date, The 40 ACRES Archive has collaborated with The University of Richmond, 1708 Gallery, Reynolds Gallery, Oakwood Arts, The Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington, The Sacred Ground Historical Reclamation Project, Reclaiming the Monument, George Mason University, Cultural DC, The Shed, The Weeksville Heritage Center, and many other amazing community partners and activists.
Written and researched by Ryan Doherty & Sandy Williams IV
