USA HISTORY

Detailed explanation-1: -Union General William T. Sherman’s plan to give newly-freed families “forty acres and a mule” was among the first and most significant promises made – and broken – to African Americans.

Detailed explanation-2: -The government didn’t keep its promise of 40 acres and a mule. Following President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination on April 15, 1865, President Andrew Johnson rescinded Field Order 15 and returned to Confederate owners the 400, 000 acres of land-“a strip of coastline stretching from Charleston, South Carolina to the St.

Detailed explanation-3: -Forty acres and a mule was part of Special Field Orders No. 15, a wartime order proclaimed by Union General William Tecumseh Sherman on January 16, 1865, during the American Civil War, to allot land to some freed families, in plots of land no larger than 40 acres (16 ha).

Detailed explanation-4: -William T. Sherman’s Special Field Order 15. It set aside land along the Southeast coast so that “each family shall have a plot of not more than forty acres of tillable ground.” That plan later became known by a signature phrase: “40 acres and a mule."