Sherman's arrangements were rescinded by Johnson after Lincoln's death. They were also never intended to be permanent settlements of title to land for potentially hundreds of thousands or millions of acres. Much less to serve as a precedent to be applied across the entire south.
Military officers, in the American system, simply do not have such power. Confiscate land or other property and assign it permanently to whomever they please. Nor should they.
If land was to be permanently confiscated, with proven title transferred to new owners, it would require an act of Congress. And there is considerable room for debate whether Congress would have constitutional authority to do so.
For Congress to exercise such power, the constitutional provisions about due process, act of attainder, corruption of blood, and probably several other provisions would have to be ruled inapplicable. Which could only be the case if the seceding states had actually left the Union and were now conquered provinces whose inhabitants and their property could be dealt with as the conquerors chose. The problem is that the war had been fought on the theory that it was the suppression of an insurrection, not a war against a foreign enemy.
Sherman had a problem. He had tens of thousands of ex-slaves on his hands in his department, abandoned by their masters, or fled from them. This created an immense drain on his resources, which he needed to fight a war, not to babysit freedmen.
There were also hundreds of thousands of acres of land abandoned by the legal owners which his forces were occupying. The ex-slaves were experienced farmers, for the most part.
So as a temporary expedient, he settled the ex-slaves on the abandoned land so they could support themselves until permanent arrangements were made by the appropriate civil authorities. This was obviously also in the interests of the freedmen, allowing them to be productive rather than live on castoffs of the army.
However, for purposes of discussion, let's run some numbers. 4M ex-slaves, 1M families, 40 acres per family.
That's 40M acres, 62,500 square miles.
Conveniently, just slightly larger than the state of Georgia.
Thank you, tell that to the new repub JoeBroK who apparently has great need to believe the fantasy of Princeton academics who are of the Wilsonian school. And coming up with an Austrian (Austrian?) conspiracy amateur.
The radical repubs have returned in the current neo-marxist, liberation theology reparations crowd, desperately using the tools of the academic ivory towers and media to “make their case”. They don’t have one. And, for that matter for many, many people neither did the Norther oligarchs, who still machine to control us all. The great State. Left or Right it is still the State.