If, as historian Eric Foner writes, Reconstruction was “America’s unfinished revolution,” “Forty Acres and Mule” has come to serve as a stand-in for the period’s ill-fated promises and unfulfilled potential. As mantras go, it has taken on a life of its own. It’s the name of Spike Lee’s production studio, it was prominently featured in an episode of the “1619” podcast from the New York Times, and it always crops up as a critical precedent in the ongoing case for reparations. Yet despite the idea’s place in American cultural memory and the yeoman’s work historians have done to explain its origins, we still tend to describe it as either a doomed policy or half-hearted promise by the federal government. This papers over its far more powerful and far-reaching origin story as a shared vision of freedom held by tens of thousands of the formerly enslaved. 

The standard story goes something like this: in December of 1864, months before the end of the Civil War, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s army strode into Savannah after completing a month-and-a-half long romp through the state of Georgia. In its wake came thousands of freedpeople who had left plantations and followed the army to the coast. Unsure of what to do with the tired, hungry, and displaced people trailing his wagon trains, Sherman convened a meeting. He and United States Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton met with twenty of Savannah’s black religious leaders, most if not all of whom had been enslaved and who had chosen Garrison Frazier, an aging minister in poor health, as their spokesperson. The purpose of the meeting, supposedly, was to ascertain what could be done for the freedpeople of Georgia, including those refugees who had just arrived with the army. 

What was designed as a simple meeting, though, soon unfolded as a wartime reckoning over slavery, capped off by Frazier offering a vision of freedom predicated on black landownership and black autonomy. “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor,” he claimed, insisting “we want to be placed on land until we can buy it and make it our own.” And he believed that because of the intense racial animus directed toward freedmen and women, it was best for Georgia’s black population to live separately from whites, at least until the problem of race prejudice subsided. 

Four days later, Sherman put the results of the meeting into motion. He issued his famous Field Order No. 15, which set aside a strip of land from Charleston to Jacksonville, running thirty miles inland, exclusively for black ownership. In what was then the most radical escalation of Reconstruction policy, land redistribution became a state-sanctioned objective backed by the full force of the U.S. military. That Sherman only imagined the order as a temporary solution to a wartime problem would ultimately doom the project, but for the time being, freedpeople throughout the region basked in the thought of receiving their “forty-acre allotment” of “Sherman land” and living free of white control. The mule would come in a second order issued later, thus the likely origins of the famous phrase.  

In part, at stake in the story is the simple fact that it happened. As Henry Louis Gates has written, “the promise was the first systemic attempt to provide a form of reparations to newly freed slaves, and it was radical for its time,” even “proto-socialist in its implications.” Similarly, Eric Foner suggests it signaled that the Civil War had laid the groundwork for a “transformation of the South even more radical than the end of slavery.” Important, too, is the fact that the provision was not all Sherman’s doing, but was instead a vision articulated by Frazier, a former slave, and endorsed by a cadre of African American leaders, giving the idea sanction as a kind of black blueprint for an emancipated America. 

Often missed in this rendition of events, however, is just who the architects of this blueprint really were. True, Frazier was an invaluable spokesman, and it was his clear-eyed interview that compelled Sherman and Stanton to act as they did. But toward the end of the interview, Frazier admitted that the vision was not his alone. In response to a query asking whether his opinion was a consensus shared by freedpeople throughout the region, Frazier responded that indeed it was and that he had formed his position in the course of his ministry and in his talks with the “thousands that followed the Union army, leaving their homes and undergoing suffering.” “I did not think there would be so many,” he told his two powerful interviewers, “the number surpassed my expectations.”

Why does this little nugget matter? It matters because in the weeks and months following Sherman’s order, some forty thousand freedpeople from across the region would begin resettling close to 400,000 acres of land, which sparked a transformation of the American Lowcountry. Islands once only sparsely settled became populated by refugees, and the deprivation that stemmed from being displaced for so long brought increased aid and attention to a region in the midst of a remaking. Moreover, schools were built, new towns formed, and men and women began establishing new lives outside of slavery. Reconstruction’s most revolutionary moment had been wrenched into place by the demands of displaced people. 

Frazier’s mention of the refugees matters too because it brings the story full circle. He was acknowledging that the vision of freedom inherent in Sherman’s field order was not just the result of a singular meeting held between government officials and Savannah’s black pastorate, but was rather a shared vision etched into place by thousands of refugees who made the daunting decision to leave their homes and march off in search of freedom. In this nearly always forgotten admission, Frazier offers a clear link between the origins of “Forty Acres and a Mule” and the expectations of freedom that freedpeople carried with them throughout the process of emancipation—which, in a way, captures what often goes missing in how we relate the idea’s origins. Without a doubt, “Forty Acres and a Mule” remains an unfulfilled promise from the American government. But as Frazier makes clear, the promise began, first, as a political vision articulated and advanced by men and women who spoke the loudest with their feet. 

The mantra was theirs.