Sherman's "Forty Acres" Promise Rescinded by Johnson

General Sherman's Special Field Order No. 15 (January 1865) had reserved 400,000 acres of South Carolina and Georgia coastal land for freed Black families — roughly 40 acres each. Approximately 40,000 freedpeople settled the land. President Andrew Johnson reversed the order in September 1865, returning confiscated land to pardoned former Confederates and evicting Black families. The broken promise of land redistribution condemned most freedpeople to sharecropping dependency.