That promise of 40 acres and a mule to freed Black slaves turned out to be short-lived and mostly unfulfilled.
The order, signed by Gen. William Sherman with President Abraham Lincoln’s approval two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, gave Black people what their community leaders said they most wanted: land. The order set aside 400,000 acres along the southeastern coast that had been confiscated from Confederate landowners. (The Army later offered up spare mules.) Thousands settled on the land, but three months after the order was signed, Lincoln was assassinated and his successor, President Andrew Johnson, a sympathizer with the South, overturned it, leaving most of the freed slaves with nothing.
That offer was as close as the federal government ever came to substantial reparations for slavery, one of the worst crimes against humanity in history.
