Sherman's Special Field Order 15

This Day in History

Jan. sixteen, 1865: Special Field Social club No. xv

Time Periods: Reconstruction Period: 1865 - 1876

Themes: African American, Reconstruction, Commonwealth & Citizenship, Laws & Denizen Rights

On January. sixteen, 1865 demands past Black ministers after the Ebenezer Creek Massacre led to the short-lived land distribution during Reconstruction known as Special Field Social club No. fifteen.

This social club declared that confiscated country on the coastline from Charleston, Due south Carolina, to Jacksonville, Florida, be redistributed to people freed from slavery in 40-acre parcels. Hither is an excerpt:

II. At Beaufort, Hilton Head, Savannah, Fernandina, St. Augustine and Jacksonville, the Blacks may remain in their chosen or accustomed vocations — but on the islands, and in the settlements hereafter to exist established, no white person whatever, unless military officers and soldiers detailed for duty, will be permitted to reside; and the sole and sectional management of affairs will be left to the freed people themselves, subject only to the U.s.a. military authority and the acts of Congress.

Inside half-dozen months, 40,000 people who had been enslaved lived on 400,000 acres of coastal land. They used their skills and labor to make the land productive. They also set up their own civic and educational institutions. They established their own militia to protect themselves from the Klan. In the PBS documentary, Reconstruction: The 2d Civil State of war historian Russell Duncan says,

So you've got this tiny little island, twelve miles long, iii miles wide, and a government set up to-to resemble the U.s.a. government with a Supreme Court at the elevation. Information technology's wonderful, beautiful, experiment in democracy; and people took to it very well. They liked the idea of having the ability to select their leaders and remove them.

Sadly, the Field Order was shortlived. Every bit explained in Blackpast,

Less than a year after Sherman's order, President Andrew Johnson intervened, and ordered that the vast bulk of confiscated land be returned to its former owners. This included almost of land that the freedmen had settled. The Federal government dispossessed tens of thousands of Black landholders. In Georgia and S Carolina, some blacks fought back, driving away one-time owners with guns. Federal troops sometimes evicted Blacks by force.

Teach Reconstruction advisor and Catholic Academy professor Stephen West alerted us to principal documents from Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867 related to this history. He tweeted

Petitions from freedpeople subsequently Johnson ordered that land be restored to former Confederates.

They declared their loyalty, their sense of betrayal, and their attachment to lands they had cultivated and where their ancestors were buried.

— Stephen West (@Stephen_A_West) January 16, 2020

Introduce this history to young people with the lessons and books listed below. The books include the young adult novelsCrossing Ebenezer Creek by Tonya Bolden and40 Acres and Maybe a Mule by Harriette Robinet. We likewise recommend the film referenced above, Reconstruction: The Second Civil War.

Learn more in the Zinn Pedagogy Project national report, "Erasing the Blackness Freedom Struggle: How Country Standards Neglect to Teach the Truth About Reconstruction," and discover education resources on Reconstruction below.