Posted on 09/19/2025 11:56:52 AM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
...Following President Abraham Lincoln's assassination on April 15, 1865, President Andrew Johnson rescinded Field Order 15 and returned to Confederate owners the 400,000 acres of land—“a strip of coastline stretching from Charleston, South Carolina to the St. John’s River in Florida, including Georgia’s Sea Islands and the mainland 30 miles in from the coast.”
Roy L. Brooks, a distinguished professor of law at the University of San Diego School of Law, described Johnson as a segregationist “who wanted to basically return African Americans to a position of subordination.”
Without land of their own to work, the 3.9 million members of the formerly enslaved population struggled to control their own destiny after the Civil war ended. Many found themselves working white people’s land as sharecroppers or tenant farmers, a system that was only slightly better than slavery, given the meager wages and exploitation associated with it.
...Some Black people defeated the odds and managed to become landowners. Most, however, had no land to pass on, which prevented them from accumulating multi-generational wealth and left them largely under the control of Southern white landowners.
The failed promise of “40 acres and a mule denied African Americans the ability to generate financial self-sufficiency, which was needed in order to resist as much as possible the Jim Crow policies of the local government in the South,” Brooks says.
“It would have provided a very timely reparation for African Americans, which would have changed the course of racial history. It would have changed the trajectory of racial inequality in our society.”
(Excerpt) Read more at history.com ...
There is no law on the books promising anyone 40 acres and a mule.
It is very difficult to know what “might have happened”
No human knows. We do know the former Confederates resorted to, essentially guerrilla warfare in the South, during reconstruction.
The compromise, about a decade later, was to allow the former Confederates to take back control of their state govenments, in order to prevent another Civil war.
So we just do not know what might have happened if the Radical Republicans had their way.
I thought Lincoln’s plan was to return them to Africa.
It was a temporary fix by Sherman after he burnt down the South. Johnson reversed it. Generals make orders all the time during war the civilian governments have to cancel. They like to set themselves up as local conquering dictators. Can’t blame them but acting like this was some sort of Indian giving by the US is more whingeing by the professional victim class.
President Andrew Johnson rescinded Field Order 15 and returned to Confederate owners the 400,000 acres of land—“a strip of coastline stretching from Charleston, South Carolina to the St. John’s River in Florida, including Georgia’s Sea Islands and the mainland 30 miles in from the coast.
So he returned the land back to its rightful owners.
Now look up “Pigford.”
Still, it might have been a better long term solution. You pay off the original landowners the full value. Costly, but cheaper than war on both sides.
There were draft riots in NYC in 1863.
Men were drafted and many served for four years.
About 300,000 Union men didn’t survive the war.
If you think those men had it easy, Zelensky might find a job for you.
The wealth that slavery made possible was largely destroyed by the effort that ended slavery - gone with the wind.
Bkmk
“Multi-generational wealth” is quite rare.
It’s found in maybe 2% of American households - mainly farmers.
Most household wealth in most of the 20th Century was in housing. When a house was sold and the proceeds split in probate, there typically was not enough wealth for an heir to buy a house. The money tended to get spent.
Primogeniture was created so family wealth wouldn’t get dissipated by estate splitting.
“In 1931, Wall Street tycoon, physicist, and patron of scientific research Alfred Lee Loomis, along with his brother-in-law and partner Landon K. Thorne, purchased 17,000 acres (69 km2) on the island (over 63% of the total landmass) for about $120,000 to be used as a private game reserve.”
“The beginning of Hilton Head as a resort started in 1956 with Charles E. Fraser developing Sea Pines Resort. Soon, other developments followed, such as Hilton Head Plantation, Palmetto Dunes Plantation, Shipyard Plantation, and Port Royal Plantation, imitating Sea Pines’ architecture and landscaping.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilton_Head_Island,_South_Carolina
I live about a mile from a barrier island in Florida. Land on it could be had for $10/acre in the 1930s. My former neighbor Bob worked on the plumbing of Opray Winfrey’s house.
Exactly. And the consequences lasted for decades in the South.
This I understand is America’s richest neighborhood:
https://findingnaples.com/neighborhoods/port-royal
The ‘land’ was once a mangrove swamp bought for $10,000 in 1938.
The federal government gave Mar-a-Lago back to the Post family.
“If any two hundred Southern men backed by a Federal administration should go to Indianapolis, turn out the Indiana people, take possession of all the seats of power, honor, and profit, denounce the people at large as assassins and barbarians, introduce corruption in all the branches of the public administration, make government a curse instead of a blessing, league with the most ignorant class of society to make war on the enlightened, intelligent, and virtuous, what kind of social relations would such a state of things beget.”
Mississippi Representative Wiley P. Harris, Democrat, 1875
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpetbagger
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