page_title: Forty acres and a mule
section_title: Sea Islands
hierarchical_section_title: Forty acres and a mule / War / Sea Islands
caption_attribution_description: "The Old Plantation," South Carolina, about 1790. This famous painting shows Gullah slaves dancing and playing musical instruments derived from Africa. Scholars unaware of the Sierra Leone slave trade connection have interpreted the two female figures as performing a "scarf" dance. Sierra Leoneans can easily recognize that they are playing the shegureh, a women's instrument (rattle) characteristic of the Mende and neighboring tribes.
context_page_description: Forty acres and a mule is 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. Sherman later ordered the army to lend mules for the agrarian reform effort. The field orders followed a series of conversations between Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton and Radical Republican abolitionists Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens following disruptions to the institution of slavery provoked by the American Civil War. Many freed people believed, after being told by various political figures, that they had a right to own the land they had been forced to work as slaves, and were eager to control their own property. Freed people widely expected to legally claim 40 acres of land and a mule after the end of the war. Some freedmen took advantage of the order and took initiatives to acquire land plots along a strip of South Carolina, Georgia and Florida coasts.
context_section_description: The Union Army occupied the Sea Islands after the November 1861 Battle of Port Royal, leaving the area's many cotton plantations to the black farmers who worked on them. The early liberation of the Sea Island blacks, and the relatively unusual absence of the former white masters, raised the issue of how the South might be organized after the fall of slavery. Lincoln, commented State Department official Adam Gurowski, "is frightened with the success in South Carolina, as in his opinion this success will complicate the question of slavery." In the early days of federal occupation, troops were badly mistreating the island's residents, and had raided plantation supplies of food and clothing. One Union officer was caught preparing to secretly transport a group of blacks to Cuba, in order to sell them as slaves. Abuses by Union troops continued even after a stable regime had been established.
  Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase had in December deployed Colonel William H. Reynolds to collect and sell whatever cotton could be confiscated from the Sea Island plantations. Soon after, Chase deployed Edward Pierce (after his brief period at Grand Contraband Camp) to assess the situation in Port Royal. Pierce found a plantation under strict Army control, paying wages too low to enable economic independence; he also criticized the Army's policy of shipping cotton North to be ginned. Pierce reported that the black workers were experts in cotton farming but required white managers "to enforce a paternal discipline". He recommended the establishment of a supervised black farming collective to prepare the workers for the responsibilities of citizenship—and to serve as a model for post-slavery labor relations in the South.
  The Treasury Department sought to raise money and in many cases was already leasing occupied territories to Northern capitalists for private management. For Port Royal Colonel Thomas had already prepared an arrangement of this type; but Pierce insisted that Port Royal offered the chance to "settle a great social question": namely, whether "when properly organized, and with proper motives set before them, [blacks] will as freemen be as industrious as any race of men are likely to be in this climate." Chase sent Pierce to see President Lincoln. As Pierce later described the encounter:
  Mr. Lincoln, who was then chafing under a prospective bereavement, listened for a few moments, and then said, somewhat impatiently, that he did not think he ought to be troubled with such details, that there seemed to be an itching to get negroes into our lines; to which I replied that these negroes were within them by the invitation of no one, being domiciled there before we began occupation. The President then wrote and handed to me the following card :
  I shall be obliged if the Secretary of the Treasury will in his discretion give Mr. Pierce such instructions in regard to Port Royal contrabands as may seem judicious. A. LINCOLN.
  Pierce accepted this reluctant mandate, but feared that "some unhappy compromise" might compromise his plan to engineer black citizenship.
caption: Gullah slaves had farmed the Sea Islands for several generations.
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