During the Reconstruction period of 1865–1877, federal law provided civil rights protection in the U.S. South for freedmen, the African Americans who had formerly been slaves. In the 1870s, Democrats gradually returned to power in the Southern states, sometimes as a result of elections in which paramilitary groups intimidated opponents, attacking blacks or preventing them from voting. Gubernatorial elections were close and disputed in Louisiana for years, with extreme violence being unleashed during the campaigns. In 1877, a national compromise to gain Southern support in the presidential election resulted in the last of the federal troops being withdrawn from the South. White Democrats had regained political power in every Southern state. These conservative, white, Democratic Redeemer governments legislated Jim Crow laws, which segregated black people from the white population, and upheld them constitutionally as “separate but equal” rights.
The federal government adopted a policy of providing arable land to former black slaves during the last stages of the American Civil War in 1865. They were freed as a result of the advance of the Union armies into the territory previously controlled by the Confederacy, particularly after Major General William Tecumseh Sherman’s March to the Sea. General Sherman’s Special Field Orders, No. 15, issued on January 16, 1865, provided for the land, while some of its beneficiaries also received mules from the army for plowing. The policy became known as “forty acres and a mule.”
The Special Field Orders issued by Sherman were never intended to represent an official policy of the U.S. government with regard to all former slaves. Andrew Johnson, who succeeded President Lincoln after the assassination, revoked Sherman’s orders and returned the land to its previous white owners. Because of this, the phrase “forty acres and a mule” has come to represent the failure of Reconstruction policies in restoring to African Americans the fruits of their labor.
