Forty Acres and A Mule

After the Civil war, the former slaves envisioned a new era. A former slave interviewed in the 1930s recalled: One day a few negroes was sticking sticks in the ground when massa come up. “What you niggers doing?” he asked. “We is staking off the land, Massa. The Yankees say half of it is ourn. The massa never got mad. He just look calmlike. “Listen, niggers,” he said, “What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is yours. You’re just as free as I and the missus, but don’t go fooling around my land. I have tried to be a good master to you. I have never been unfair. Now if you wants to stay, you are welcome to work for me. I’ll pay you one-third the crops you raise. But if you wants to go, you sees the gate. The task of restoring the Union after the trauma of what Walt Whitman called “that strange, sad war” would have been difficult and complex in any case. The assassination of a beloved President made it harder still. An embittered society, a revengeful Congress and a new President with Southern sympathies -- Andrew Johnson -- set  the stage for a period of bitter dissension over the political future of the South. In the Reconstruction era, two huge rebuilding tasks had to be accomplished. The rebel states had to be brought back into the structure of the national government -- and the shattered economy of the South had to be rebuilt -- without its former advantage of slave labor. And so a new battle unfolded, about the best means to accomplish these tasks.

Four million newly-freed people in the South could now go where they wished, but they had no land and no shelter. Echoing their feelings, Frederick Douglass said these freedmen were sent away empty handed, without money, without friends, and without a foot of land to stand upon. “Many felt that political freedom, without economic assistance, would simply enable white landholders, with the aid of various local laws, to reestablish bondage. This was, generally, the position of the group in Congress that came to be known as “radical Republicans.”

One of the most hotly contested issues was the question of confiscation of Southern land. Since the slaves had tilled the soil for many years, argued the “radicals,” they had every right now to the land. However, many of these politicians wanted more beside simple justice for the former slaves; they also had a mind to punish the secessionists and remove the base of the Old South’s wealth and culture: the plantation system. They asserted that Rebel leaders who had supported secession had no right to keep their land. Foremost among Congressional leaders was Thaddeus Stevens, one of the leading radical Republicans. Suggesting that 70,000 rebels owned 394,000,000 acres of land, it seemed only fitting to him that the freedmen be given their own lands. Since this figure represented less than five per cent of white families, the vast majority of Southerners would suffer little, but the freedmen would have an opportunity to earn a living, free of the former plantation owners. According to this view, if the back of the plantation owner was to be broken, then he must be relieved of the source of his power: land.

A small amount of confiscated land had already been given to the newly freed slaves. Meeting with Black leaders, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and General William Tecumseh Sherman had recommended that land be given to the freedmen. In South Carolina and Georgia, forty acres each were given to more than 40,000 freedmen. In Davis Bend, Mississippi, large tracts of confiscated land were given to1,800 former slaves, who tilled their soil and made a handsome profit, until President Andrew Johnson rescinded all such orders.

Congress, in its discussions on land reform in the South, did not support any proposals of specific compensation in land. Some felt that this lack of support for “Forty acres and a mule” spelled defeat for the entire Reconstruction program. Some argued that protecting the political rights of the freedmen -- the right to vote, to own property and to hold office, etc., which were guaranteed in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments -- would suffice. Others thought that the confiscation of land was a violation of property rights -- a right many Congressmen felt was too sacred to tamper with. And there were those who thought that it was good for business not to give land to Black people, for two strongly self-reinforcing reasons. One was the general white attitude that they were an inferior class of being; the other was the convenience of a ready supply of cheap labor.

That, in the end, is how it turned out. Although the Freedmen’s Bureau contributed somewhat to better the lot of Black people, their economic status remained little changed. Many became sharecroppers.

Large and small landowners rented out part of their acreage for a return of 50% of their crop. Already in debt to local merchants, Blacks without the ownership of land were to remain both poor and also deprived of many of their civil rights.