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Who Is Guilty for the Harms of Slavery and Segregation?

The islands from Charleston, south, the abandoned rice fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. Johns river, Florida, are reserved and set apart for the settlement of the negroes now made free by the acts of war and the proclamation of the President of the United States. -- Special Field Order No. 15, Major General W. T. Sherman, January 15, 1865

General Sherman, a Union commander in the Civil War, further specified that each family settling the area should have a plot of up to forty acres of land and use of a surplus Army horse of mule ("forty acres and a mule").

Congress established the Freedmen's Bureau later in 1865, providing that the Bureau, under direction of the President, had authority to set apart abandoned or confiscated land in the former Confederacy and grant freedmen (former slaves) parcels of up to forty acres.

President Andrew Johnson refused to enforce the provision of the Freedmen's Bureau legislation providing for grants of land to freedmen. Land that had been confiscated from or abandoned by white Southern landowners during the Civil War was returned to them after they took an oath of future loyalty to the Union or were pardoned by President Johnson.

[image:] Cartoon of a man kicking a furniture bureau labeled "freedmen" out of a building labeled "The Veto" with the following caption. Thomas Nast, "Andrew Johnson Kicking Freedmen`s Bureau," Harper's Weekly, April 14, 1866, page 232. Reprinted with permission of HarpWeek,LLC

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Focus Questions

1. Until the Civil War, slavery was legally permissible in much of the United States. The United States Supreme Court endorsed segregation laws until 1954. Is it justifiable to declare an individual or a society guilty for committing acts that were sanctioned by the government?

2. The United States has paid reparations to Japanese Americans confined to internment camps during the Second World War. Germany has paid reparations to survivors of the Holocaust. Should the descendents of slaves be paid reparations for the harms suffered by their ancestors? What about black Americans living today who suffered the impact of segregation firsthand? To what extent can monetary reparations compensate for past harm?

3. For some Americans, the phrase "forty acres and a mule" represents a promise broken by the United States government. Others note that General Sherman's order applied only during wartime and that President Johnson was never legally compelled to grant the land contemplated in the 1865 Freedmen's Bureau Act. What happens to property confiscated by the winning side in times of war? What do you think should have been done to the land confiscated from individuals who supported the Confederacy in the Civil War?