We don’t owe black Americans 40 acres and a mule

I called a young friend of mine today.  He’s 32 years old.  I asked him what the term “40 acres and a mule” meant to him.  He said he thought he’d heard the term, and he thought it was payment for something, but he really didn’t know any more than that.

I asked another friend who’s in his 60s; educated, a former high level U.S. Government employee and Army veteran. He said he’d heard the term, but had no idea whatsoever of the context.  

I called a third friend with whom I attended high school years ago. While he had heard the phrase, he knew nothing more.

I knew in advance what each would say, but I wanted to confirm my suspicions. I don’t think any of them are unusual in this regard.  Some Americans might be a little more familiar with the topic, but I don’t think the average person, black OR white, has any actual knowledge of the real story behind the words.   At best, they have a vague notion of the concept. It’s just one more example of what we were NOT taught in school.   It’s not Black history.  It’s American history.  The story is shameful and the fact it’s not taught is even more reprehensible.   

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This is the story of 40 acres and a mule . . .

It was just four months before the end of the Civil War, and Union General William Tecumseh Sherman and some 60,000 Union troops had blazed, pillaged and ransacked their way across Georgia to Atlanta, in an early version of what our military now calls “Shock and Awe”.  Along the way, thousands of slaves were left without homes, food or a way to survive.  The homes and plantations in which they had lived all their lives had been burned and destroyed by the invading Union army and left like so much barren land after a locust invasion. Even in Georgia, it’s cold in the Winter.

A group of black ministers met with U.S. Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton regarding the problem of what to do with the newly freed slaves and the coming end to the war.  These men of God only asked that blacks be given the opportunity to live and die by their own labor.  They did not ask for money or any kind of handout.

The ministers said “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land and turn it and till it by our own labor.”   

On January 16, 1865, just four days later, General Sherman issued Special Field Order 15, which commanded that 400,000 acres of land seized from Confederate landowners would be redistributed to black families in 40 acre plots from Charleston, SC to the St. Johns river in Florida.  The mules were not actually mentioned, but the Union troops had plenty, so some were given away with the parcels of land.  By June, 40,000 acres were distributed to former slaves so that they could work the land and feed their families. 

Three months after Sherman’s order, in April of 1865, Lincoln was assassinated, and Andrew Johnson succeeded him as president.  Johnson had owned slaves and was an avowed white supremist; by the end of 1865, he overturned the order and returned the land to the original Confederate traitors and slaveowners.  

Once again, black people had been abandoned and lied to by the whites. This would come to be the greatest lie ever told to black Americans.   And make no mistake, these were Americans.   The life expectancy of a slave in America in 1850 was 36 years.   The importation of slaves to America had been prohibited by Congress in 1808, some 57 years earlier, so virtually every living slave at that time was born in America.  

These former slaves had no way to live. No money, no land, no education, and the only life they had ever known was working the land for the white man.   With no other way to survive, most of them went back to the only thing they knew.  Not as slaves, but as sharecroppers; a way of life just barely better than slavery.  The former slaveowners underpaid the blacks, and charged them unfair interest rates, which only perpetuated a continuing cycle of poverty and despair.

What little black-owned land there was, was passed down through the generations without a clear title, because of the fear that blacks had of the government, lawyers and white men in power.   Without clear title, blacks were ineligible for mortgages, disaster relief, home improvement loans or government programs.  Racism compounded this problem through systemic discrimination by government agencies and private lenders.  As a result, blacks could not get loans, crop insurance, technical assistance, market opportunities, and other benefits made available to white farmers.  This put Black farmers at a disadvantage and all but guaranteed failure, forcing many to sell their farms and seek of jobs in large, poverty stricken urban areas in the North.

Because American blacks were denied the land promised them in 1865, their legacy deviated widely from American whites.  This broken promise deprived blacks of the kind of long term, gradual prosperity that comes with the ownership of land, inheritance and family accumulation of assets.  Over the generations, this amounts to billions or even trillions of dollars of wealth stolen from slaves and their descendants.   

40 acres and mule.  It may not sound like much, but it would have been the seed that former slaves could have planted, that would have grown and prospered. With those seeds, they might have built and accumulated family wealth, thus becoming an integral part of the American dream. Those seeds were never given to blacks.

Imagine for a moment how different our county and race relations would be today, if those former slaves had been given land.  They were not strangers to hard work; they would have become self-sufficient, prosperous and productive members of our society.  They would have been able to build and accumulate wealth and pass on that wealth to their children and grandchildren.   America is built on the dream that anything is possible with hard work, but we denied that very thing to the approximately 4 million slaves we turned our backs on, by breaking our promise and then abandoning them with their new-found freedom.

As a country, we don’t owe black Americans 40 acres and a mule; we owe every descendant of slaves the equivalent of what might have been, in the form of opportunity. We owe them the chance to stand on their own two feet.  We robbed them of that opportunity for a better life in 1865, and we’ve been putting up racist roadblocks ever since. 

All they asked for was the right to live and die by their own labors.   We promised to give them 40 acres, then we took it away.

It’s time to make it right.  

Next post: Reparations.  It’s not what you think.