On this day, 12 January 1865, a key meeting took place with Black leaders in Savannah, Georgia, in which the infamous “40 acres and a mule” plan was devised during the US civil war.
Union general William Sherman met with 20 Southern Black ministers, including James Lynch and Garrison Frazier, to think of ways to help defeat the Confederacy. The ministers stated that giving land which Black people could farm themselves would be key.
Four days later, Sherman issued his Special Field Order No. 15, agreed by President Abraham Lincoln, which ordered the seizure of 400,000 acres of land from Confederate landowners, to be given in 40 acre lots to freed Black families. Sherman later ordered that the army could lend mules to the families. In the wake of the order, occupations of land by Black families increased as they took matters into their own hands, farming it and governing themselves.
But the order was reversed by the next president, the white supremacist, former enslaver and Confederate sympathiser Andrew Johnson. Johnson, who wrote “This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men" ordered that the land should be returned to its former owners: the men who had declared war on the United States. https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1897875773730897/?type=3