Collection: Field Order No. 15: The Promise of Land, The Birth of a Dream And the Betrayal That Still Echoes

(On Display: 1864 Harpers Weekly/Major General William T Sherman Cover & 1890 Major General William T Sherman Signed Declaration)

When you stand before these artifacts, understand that you are looking at a ghost—the ghost of a promise made to Black people in America, and the roots of a demand we still cry out for today: REPARATIONS!

Issued on January 16, 1865, in the heat of the Civil War, General William T. Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15 was radical, revolutionary, and Black-centered. For the first time in U.S. history, the government declared that formerly enslaved Black families—our ancestors—would be given land. Not just freedom in word, but freedom with substance.

“Each family shall have not more than forty acres of tillable ground…”

And just like that, the dream of 40 acres and a mule was born.

I tell you this truth: Sherman didn’t just sign a piece of paper—he lit a flame. That order came after he met with 20 Black leaders in Savannah, Georgia—formerly enslaved men turned ministers, teachers, organizers, and visionaries. These brothers told him plain: freedom without land is still slavery.

And for a brief, shining moment, freedom had form. Over 400,000 acres of land along the Southern coast, from South Carolina to Florida, was set aside for Black ownership. Thousands of families began to settle and work the land, building schools, planting crops, and finally tasting the dignity of self-determination.

But the dream was snatched!

In the fall of 1865, President Andrew Johnson (Confederate sympathizer and open white supremacist) rescinded the order. He handed the land back to the same traitors and insurrectionists who had gone to war against the Union to keep Black people in chains.

And here’s the bitter pill: those same enslavers (the ones who lost the war) received reparations.

Yes, you read that right.

Under Johnson’s Reconstruction policies, slave owners were compensated for their “lost property”, the human beings they could no longer legally exploit. They were also given back the very land meant for Black families.

They were allowed to start over.

But our people, who had built this country brick by brick, who had labored under lash and law, who had won their freedom with blood and prayer...were given nothing.

To this day, the U.S. government has never paid reparations to the descendants of the enslaved.

Not a dollar. Not an acre. Not an apology backed by justice.

And yet… we never forgot.

Field Order No. 15 became more than a document. It became a symbol. A claim.

It is the bedrock of every modern reparations movement.

These Field Order No. 15 related artifacts (1864 Harper's Weekly Newspaper & Gen. Sherman's Signature) are sacred.

Not because Sherman was a savior—he was not. But because the Black minds and Black voices behind this order dared to demand justice from a government built on their oppression.

So let every visitor hear this and understand:

Reparations is not a radical idea: it is an unfulfilled promise.

And until that debt is paid, the ghost of Field Order 15 will haunt every conversation about justice in America.

“Freedom without land is just another form of bondage. We remember. We reclaim. We demand!”

- Dr. Tracy P. Washington (Curator, United Crowns Mobile Museum of Black History & Culture)