According to the book, Slavery And The Making of America by James and Lois Horton, in January 1865, months before the South’s surrender, U.S. General Sherman met with about twenty black community members in Savannah, Georgia and discussed what to do with confiscated Confederate land in Georgia, South Carolina and northern Florida. The Secretary of War approved Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15. This order declared that the islands from South Charleston, the abandoned rice fields, and the country bordering the St. Johns River, Florida, were reserved for the settlement of Blacks made free by the acts of war and the Emancipation Proclamation. Each family was to be issued forty acres and an army mule.
News of Field Order No.15 spread quickly. Many former enslaved people and northern reformers concluded the government should provide all freed people with forty acres and a mule. Some white leaders doubted the legality of confiscating and redistributing property. Some Black leaders who had worked their way up the economic ladder thought that free land might foster laziness and undermine the capitalist economy they now embraced. Both thought at the end of the war, white resentment of land grants might spark riots.
The Homestead of 1862 offered 160 acres of government land free to anyone who would live on it, improve it and pay a small registration fee. In May of that year, President Lincoln signed this act into law. This Civil War era act led to Western expansion and the establishment of smaller individually owned farms.
In the spring of 1865, the war came to an end. President Lincoln had been assassinated and Vice President Andrew Johnson from Tennessee replaced him in the oval office. He spent the early days of his administration granting amnesty to former Confederate military leaders and handing out pardons. White southerners agreed to swear loyalty to the United States and agree to support the abolitionist provisions of the Thirteenth Amendment to have their property and citizenship restored. White southerners who had led the Confederacy in war applied for and received pardons. As a result, most of the land was returned to its prewar owners and the former slaves who had been living on and cultivating the land were expelled.
In 1866, pressured by abolitionists in Congress, the federal government passed the Southern Homestead Act, giving former enslaved people and whites who had remained loyal to the United States preferential access to approximately 44 million acres of public land in five southern states for a year. The land was in terrible shape and unsuitable for farming. Penniless former slaves were unable to support themselves while waiting for the first crop. Therefore, few people could take advantage of the program. The freed Black people were forced to depend on former slaveholders to employ them or rent them land to farm.
In 1879, many other freed enslaved people left the South for greater opportunities in the West. Many migrated to Kansas, where they could own land and become independent farmers. This land was in better condition. They organized into a colony and bought about a thousandacres of ground. They called themselves Exodusters. This was the first general migration of Black people after the Civil War. In addition to Kansas, they settled in Oklahoma and Colorado.
To retain the South’s cheap labor force, white Southerners tried to sabotage their exodus. Reportedly, armed white men blocked Mississippi River crossings, seized them and hacked off their hands. White sheriffs arrested Black travelers for breach of contracts and vagrancy. Despite these tactics, Black people continued west. It didn’t take long for racial intimidation and lynching to become common.
After being pardoned and political power restored, the southern farmers created new laws reinstating much of their control over Black people. They punished black farm laborers for questioning white landlords, attacked black businesses, attacked black students for being too intelligent, confronted well-dressed black people and assaulted white people for encouraging Black aspirations. Long standing customs and laws governing interracial contact in the South were designed to reinforce white supremacy.
My maternal grandparents were born around 1885 in the hill country of Mississippi. Their parents were born as enslaved people. When my grandparents became adults, the lumber industry was busy clearing hundreds of acres of forest to ship the wood out west by railroad to meet the needs of the settlers there.
At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, people began to move west of the Mississippi to settle. They needed a lot of lumber to build towns and homes. North Mississippi was one of the areas in the country that had an abundance of trees that could be used to make the lumber. Planters wanted the trees on their lands removed so they could increase their acreage for cotton crops. Business people saw opportunities in the lumber industry. They set up camp and began to clear the forest of trees. They built rail systems that ran through the camps that connected to railroads going to the west from Memphis. Some of the logs were floated down the river to New Orleans for export.
When these lumbar companies had depleted the forest of trees, they moved on. In their wake they left the landscape dotted with tree stumps. These stumps had to be removed before the land could be useful for growing cotton. In North Mississippi a rare opportunity was presented to the enterprising black farmer. On the condition that a quarter of the stumps were removed every year, my grandfather was offered a contract to be a tenant farmer. It was clear that it would take hard work if this land was going to be suitable for raising large crops.
Francie Mae. June 29, 2021.
Reference
James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton. 2005. Slavery And The Making of America. Oxford University Press, Inc. New York.