Part One: 40 Acres And a Lie

“a collaboration between the Center for Public Integrity, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and the Investigative Reporting Workshop.”

By Alexia Fernanandez Campbell, April Simpson and Pratheek Rebala
Mother Jones Magazine
July+August 2024
Special to the New Journal and Guide

Pompey Jackson was born in the heart of Georgia’s rice empire – the human property of one of the state’s wealthiest and most powerful families.

He and his sisters were among hundreds enslaved on a sprawling marshland estate called Grove Hill, where life was brutal. People died every month, mostly young children. Those who reached adulthood often suffered spinal injuries, lung disease, and foot rot from sloshing through flooded rice fields. Jackson survived smallpox. He was a teenager in late 1864 when Union General William T. Sherman and his soldiers advanced through the Ogeechee River low country on their way to capture Savannah.

Sherman freed thousands during his march through the South, later writing that “freedmen, in droves, old and young, followed [our troops] to reach a place of safety.” On January 16, 1865, at the urging of Savannah’s Black ministers, Sherman issued an edict called Special Field Orders, No. 15, which reserved large swaths of coastal South Carolina, Georgia, and northeastern Florida for the formerly enslaved to live and work on and govern themselves.

Sherman’s pledge of land for the formerly enslaved – which would become known as “40 Acres and a Mule” – remains the nation’s most famous attempt to provide some form of reparations for American slavery. Today, it is largely remembered as a broken promise and an abandoned step toward multiracial democracy. 

Less known is that the federal government actually did issue hundreds, perhaps thousands, of titles to specific plots of land between 4 and 40 acres – before ultimately changing course and returning the land to the plantation owners. (The freedmen were not, in fact, promised a mule, though some did receive them.)

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Jackson was among the first freedmen in Georgia to get one of these land titles, choosing to begin his life after the war on a plot carved out of the very rice fields where he’d spent his years enslaved. On April 20, 1865, a federal agent issued Jackson a land title for 4 acres at Grove Hill.

We came across that title as part of the Center for Public Integrity’s years-long effort to search through nearly 1.8 million records, which allowed us to identify 1,250 formerly enslaved men and women, including Jackson, who received land titles in Georgia and South Carolina in the months that followed Sherman’s field orders.

All of the records were created by the now-defunct U.S. Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, and were only digitized in the last 10 years. We first discovered some of the land titles in 2021, within a recently digitized roll of microfilm labeled “Unbound Miscellaneous Records.”

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To aid in our search, we developed an image recognition algorithm that helped us surface land titles that covered more than 24,000 acres on 34 plantations that were seized by the Union Army from Confederate landowners. While the titles we have represent just a fraction of those distributed under Sherman’s orders, we were able to identify at least 34 former plantations where specific land was granted to Black families and then taken back.

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In 2000, when Congress passed the Freedmen’s Bureau Preservation Act, it financed a five-year effort to index and microfilm the records – mostly handwritten, and often in elaborate penmanship – from the Reconstruction-era agency charged with aiding millions of emancipated slaves.

In the years that followed, the Mormon Church began digitizing images from the microfilm through its genealogy platform FamilySearch, making 1.5 million records available online in partnership with the National Archives.

Eric Foner, a leading historian who has written extensively about the Civil War, said this digitization was vital because there are no other sources outside of the Freedmen’s Bureau records that illustrate this aspect of Reconstruction so clearly.

While historians had long known that at least some of these titles still existed – one has been featured on the National Archives website since at least 2007 – such a large collection has never been published and analyzed in one place.

“These records contain an enormous amount of genealogical information that has not been readily available to many African Americans,” said historian Karen Cook Bell, who said she first ­encountered­­ some land titles back in 1991 while searching through National Archives paper records by hand to research her dissertation.

“Having this kind of evidence – of actual families who received land and had that land taken away – certainly can address, in some measure, the issue of reparations,” said Cook Bell, whose 2018 book, Claiming Freedom: Race, Kinship, and Land in Nineteenth-Century Georgia, documents life on low country plantations such as Grove Hill.

In her book, she identified nearly 400 formerly enslaved men and women in Georgia who had received land titles. “When you talk about the economic inequalities in American society, they all center around who has access to property, and who has access to land.”

After surfacing the digitized land titles and logs entries, we conducted genealogical research to trace what happened to the descendants of these 1,250 men and women in the century and a half since Sherman’s promise was broken – reviewing thousands of Freedmen’s Bureau bank records, marriage certificates, and census documents.

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Many names didn’t appear on any other public records; other names were too common to research with confidence. Ultimately, we created family trees for about 100 of the freedmen and women and identified 41 of their living descendants.

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“I had no idea,” said Mila Rios, after being shown a Freedmen’s Bureau log that included the name of her great-great-grandfather, Pompey Jackson. “That’s infringement. It was given to him and taken back.”

Sherman’s special Field Orders, No. 15 set aside the islands and coastline of Georgia, South Carolina, and northeastern Florida exclusively “for the settlement of the negroes now made free by the acts of war.” The orders granted the head of each family up to 40 acres of land on seized or abandoned plantations, and afforded them military protection “until such time as they can protect themselves, or until Congress shall regulate their title.”

The orders further noted that “in the settlements hereafter to be established, no white person whatever, unless military officers and soldiers detailed for duty, will be permitted to reside; and the sole and exclusive management of affairs will be left to the freed people themselves.” In his memoirs, Sherman explained that he had not necessarily intended to ensure the freedmen the right to the land indefinitely, but at least through the end of the war and until federal officials took more permanent measures.

In the meantime, the task of explaining and administering the orders fell to Rufus Saxton, a decorated Union general, who traveled to the Second African Baptist Church in Savannah on a February afternoon in 1865. After an organist played a celebratory hymn and the Reverend Ulysses L. Houston, who’d helped persuade Sherman to redistribute land, offered a prayer, Saxton addressed those who had crowded into the church that day.

“The soil is the source of all true prosperity and wealth,” Saxton reportedly told those who had gathered in the pews. “No people can be great unless they own soil. You know that; General Sherman knows it; our Father in heaven knows it. And now I want to tell you, you may own the soil.” Saxton’s declaration created a stir, but his words would come back to haunt him.

40 Acres and a Lie

Photo:  Chris Burnett; Source images: National Archives; Freedmen’s Bureau Records (2);

Library of Congress; Federico Respini/Unsplash; Shutterstock; Photo12/Universal Images Group; Corbis/Getty (2)

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