Four days later, Sherman put the results of the meeting into motion. He issued his famous Field Order No. 15, which set aside a strip of land from Charleston to Jacksonville, running thirty miles inland, exclusively for black ownership. In what was then the most radical escalation of Reconstruction policy, land redistribution became a state-sanctioned objective backed by the full force of the U.S. military. That Sherman only imagined the order as a temporary solution to a wartime problem would ultimately doom the project, but for the time being, freedpeople throughout the region basked in the thought of receiving their “forty-acre allotment” of “Sherman land” and living free of white control. The mule would come in a second order issued later, thus the likely origins of the famous phrase.
In part, at stake in the story is the simple fact that it happened. As Henry Louis Gates has written, “the promise was the first systemic attempt to provide a form of reparations to newly freed slaves, and it was radical for its time,” even “proto-socialist in its implications.” Similarly, Eric Foner suggests it signaled that the Civil War had laid the groundwork for a “transformation of the South even more radical than the end of slavery.” Important, too, is the fact that the provision was not all Sherman’s doing, but was instead a vision articulated by Frazier, a former slave, and endorsed by a cadre of African American leaders, giving the idea sanction as a kind of black blueprint for an emancipated America.
Often missed in this rendition of events, however, is just who the architects of this blueprint really were. True, Frazier was an invaluable spokesman, and it was his clear-eyed interview that compelled Sherman and Stanton to act as they did. But toward the end of the interview, Frazier admitted that the vision was not his alone. In response to a query asking whether his opinion was a consensus shared by freedpeople throughout the region, Frazier responded that indeed it was and that he had formed his position in the course of his ministry and in his talks with the “thousands that followed the Union army, leaving their homes and undergoing suffering.” “I did not think there would be so many,” he told his two powerful interviewers, “the number surpassed my expectations.”
Why does this little nugget matter? It matters because in the weeks and months following Sherman’s order, some forty thousand freedpeople from across the region would begin resettling close to 400,000 acres of land, which sparked a transformation of the American Lowcountry. Islands once only sparsely settled became populated by refugees, and the deprivation that stemmed from being displaced for so long brought increased aid and attention to a region in the midst of a remaking. Moreover, schools were built, new towns formed, and men and women began establishing new lives outside of slavery. Reconstruction’s most revolutionary moment had been wrenched into place by the demands of displaced people.