WI: The promise of 40 Acres & a Mule was kept?

On January 16th, 1865, General William T. Sherman instructed that 400,000 acres across the Atlantic Cosst of Georgia, South Carolina and Northern Florida be divvied up into 40 acre plots and be redistributed to black slaves who had suffered unspeakably under slavery.

Infamously, Sherman and the U.S. Government never fulfilled this promise, believing that traditional wage labor rather than a redistribution of land would help freedmen move upwards in society, and gave the land back to its prewar owners. Many of these owners were former slave owners.

What if Sherman and the federal government kept its original promise of giving Atlantic Coast land to freedmen and former slaves? What effects would this have on the Southern economy, culture and collective identity? Would this be viewed as an example for future land redistribution, or would it just be limited to the original 400,000 acres? How would this change the general Southern psyche?

And, arguably most importantly, would this help freedmen achieve economic and social prosperity, rather than becoming then becoming second-class citizens like they did in OTL?
 
I guess to make this happen you’d need more sympathy for the freedmen among Northerners? Not sure how to pull it off, maybe some Confederate soldiers actually “take to the hills” as was suggested OTL? This frees up these soldiers’ lands to be taken by freedmen, but I can’t even imagine the level of animosity between the locals and the freedmen moving in...
 
Here is C. Vann Woodward's argument against the feasibility of land redistribution, as summarized in an old soc.history.what-if post of mine:

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Briefly, Stevens wanted the confiscation of all "rebel" estates of over $10,000 or 200 acres. The redistribution would give 40 acres to each adult male freedman. What was left over would be sold to the highest bidder and the proceeds used for pensions for Union soldiers, partial retirement of the national debt, etc.

Would it have worked? One of the few extended essays in counterfactual history by a distinguished historian, C. Vann Woodward's "Reconstruction: A Counterfactual Playback" (in his book _The Future of the Past_) gives good reasons for skepticism, which I will summarize here:

First, the same Congress that was contemplating helping the freedmen also made a great show of helping farmers get free land in the west through the Homestead and other acts. We know the result of that--the homesteaders got screwed. Land-grant railroads alone got four times as much land as the homesteaders, and of the patents actually granted to homesteaders a great many were handed to pawns of speculators and monopolists. What land bona fide homesteaders *did* get was typically the worst.

Is there any reason to expect things to have been different in the South? Remember that nine-tenths of the 394 million acres of "rebel" land were slated for sale to the highest bidder. This was certainly an invitation to speculators and monopolists, who might have gotten all the best land, leaving the freedmen with the worst.

What's more, Congress actually did pass a Southern Homestead Act. There were 47,700,000 acres of public land in five of the Confederate states in 1861--more than the amount of land set aside for the freedmen under the hypothetical Stevens Act. The 1866 Southern Homestead Act passed by the Radicals theoretically made it possible for homesteaders to get *80* acres--and the Act favored freedmen by excluding ex-Confederates from homesteading privileges. Nevertheless, very few ex-slaves participated. Lack of credit and transportation are probably to blame for this. Perhaps the Stevens bill would not have involved as great transportation costs for the freedmen--they presumably could get the land they had already worked (although determining just who gets what land would be a considerable administrative problem, and the people doing the administering would be white). But there would still be the problem of credit. Land is not enough. Farmers would, after all, need some money to get by until the first harvest was in; they would need tools; and they would need some experience in managing a small farm (I don't think the experience gained by being part of a work-gang on a plantation is the same thing).

Perhaps the Freedmen's Bureau or some other agencies could have helped the freedmen to get these things but one questions whether northern taxpayers, who might be happy enough about confiscating "rebel" estates, would be willing to finance such help.

And as Woodward points out, some of the very officials who would administer the act to guarantee land for black people in the South were the ones who were supposed to do the same for American Indians in the West. General Howard, who had headed the Freedmen's Bureau, later negotiated a treaty with the Apaches. General Sherman moved from command of the Southern District to the Western District. The result of course was that white supremacy won out as completely in Arizona as in Alabama.

Finally, what Woodward really dwells on is the problem of white resistance--boycotts of the black farmers, outright terror, pressure to sell farms to white people at nominal prices. In short, the same pressures that "persuaded" blacks not to exercise rights like voting would have worked in the area of land ownership as well. Woodward has some sarcastic fun imagining the most Draconian or "Stalinist" measures conceivable aginst southern white supremacists and their northen Copperhead friends. He notes that perhaps Alaska, providentially purchased from the Russians, could be our Siberia, but doubts that even this would be enough to deal with millions of people. Anyway, his real point is that even the Radicals would never have accepted the bloodshed he thinks an attempt to force land redistribution would cause.

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/edq5XylNYrQ/I9g4_t8yfS0J
 
On January 16th, 1865, General William T. Sherman instructed that 400,000 acres across the Atlantic Cosst of Georgia, South Carolina and Northern Florida be divvied up into 40 acre plots and be redistributed to black slaves who had suffered unspeakably under slavery.

Infamously, Sherman and the U.S. Government never fulfilled this promise,?

Did Sherman ever promise that the Blacks could keep the land permanently?"

During his march to the sea he had accumulated many thousands of black "camp followers" and he had to stable them somewhere. He almost certainly knew that he had no authority to transfer ownership of the land, and indeed that the government's power to do so was highly doubtful. Iirc the Freedmen's Bureau Act provided for settling freedmen on abandoned lands with "such title as the United States can convey", a form of words which suggests that Congress too was doubtful about its powers in this area.
 
'40 acres and a mule' sounds nice, but the freedmen have no capital... and thus, can't buy seeds, tools, plows, etc... and if they have families, they have to support them somehow while they are getting their first crop in. Plus, they now have to worry about housing, clothing, etc. I'd imagine that a lot of freedmen would be selling their 40 acres to speculators from the north PDQ...
 
Most realistically you get.... a slight boost for the prospects of the freedmen and a slight boost for education -- more funding for freedman's bureau schools so I guess a "New Ninth" instead of a "Talented Tenth" ttl. Adds up to say a decade's worth of momentum for *Civil rights in practice as the end result.
 
it occurred to me later that one result of this might be a form of eternal 'debt enslavement' for the freedmen; with no capital, they might be targeted by the 19th century loansharks, giving out high interest loans so the freedmen can set up their farms and houses on their 40 acres... somewhat like 'company store' debt for coal miners back in the day...
 
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