January 16 The Radical Policy of Field Order 15

On this day in labor history, the year was 1865.

That was the day General William T Sherman issued Field Order #15.

The order sought to redistribute 400,000 acres of land to freed blacks in 40-acre tracts.

The area stretched from Charleston, South Carolina to Jacksonville, Florida, from the Atlantic Ocean to thirty miles inland.

It also included many coastal islands as well as Georgia’s Sea Islands.

Coming on the heels of Sherman’s March to the Sea, the order was issued from Savannah, Georgia.

Four days earlier, Sherman had met there with twenty black ministers and Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton.

Sherman and Stanton asked the group a series of questions: How did they understand slavery?

And what did freedom mean to them?

When asked what the Freedmen wanted most, Garrison Frazier, the group’s spokesman, replied, “Land.”

And when asked whether they would prefer to live among whites or not, they replied no, “As the prejudice of whites would take years to overcome.”

The order provided for the immediate settlement of black refugees on confiscated land.

Land redistribution to former slaves was radical policy to break the economic power of the Confederacy, punish South Carolina for starting the war and begin to consolidate a new class of agricultural laborers.

The land titles were possessory however, and contingent upon the Freedman’s Bureau to award permanent titles.

President Andrew Johnson moved quickly in the wake of Lincoln’s assassination to overturn Field Order 15.

And within a year, it would be reversed and confiscated lands would be returned to newly pardoned Confederates and plantation owners.

The overturning of the Order and later, of Reconstruction, would lay the basis for a new type of slavery.

That of sharecropping, debt peonage and contract labor.