Hoping to dissuade the thousands of slaves who followed his army in Georgia, General William Sherman and the Secretary of War met their leaders in Savannah, January 12, 1865. The war “is taking us from under the yoke of bondage, and placing us where we could reap the fruit of our own labor,” one leader declared. “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn it and till it ... until we are able to buy it and make it our own” (Jones, 2009, p. 219).

Four days afterward Sherman issued Special Field Order 15 as a practical and temporary policy. It “set apart” abandoned plantations on Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia, thirty miles inland from Charleston to the St. Lawrence River in Florida, for ex-slaves. Families would have “possessory title” to forty-acre farms and use army mules. More than 10,000 families built homes, planted, and “anticipated permanent possession.” But in its Freedmen's Bureau bill, Congress did not authorize confiscation of former slaveholders’ lands. This aborted general black landowning and helped interests for “more and cheaper cotton.” The Bureau oversaw freedpeople's transition into farm tenancy, the vast majority as sharecroppers.