Imagine how differently America would look today if the nation honored “40 acres and a mule”: Chuck Ardo

LANCASTER, Ohio — “Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole” Ta-Nehisi Coats wrote in the Atlantic, making his case for reparations for this country’s treatment of its African-American population.

As the Civil War was drawing to a close Union general William T. Sherman met with a group of African-American ministers to discuss what the future might look like for newly freed slaves. Their spokesman, the Rev. Garrison Frazier, a Baptist minister, told Sherman “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land and turn it and till it by our own labor. We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own,” according to “The Making of the American South: A Short History, 1500-1877,” By J. William Harris.

A few days later “Sherman issued his Special Field Order No. 15, which confiscated as Union property a strip of coastline stretching from Charleston, South Carolina, to the St. John’s River in Florida, including Georgia’s Sea Islands and the mainland thirty miles in from the coast. The order redistributed the roughly 400,000 acres of land to newly freed Black families in forty-acre segments” as recorded by the New Georgia Encyclopedia.

But the government didn’t keep its promise of 40 acres and a mule after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. Vice president Andrew Johnson, who replaced Lincoln, rescinded Field Order 15 and returned to Confederate owners the 400,000 acres of land.

Chuck Ardo is a retired political consultant in Lancaster, Ohio. He previously served as press secretary to former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell.

Roy L. Brooks, a distinguished professor of law at the University of San Diego School of Law, described Johnson as a segregationist “who wanted to basically return African Americans to a position of subordination.”

But he was not the only politician who opposed this form of reparations for Black Americans.

“After the Civil War, there just wasn’t that appetite for Black reparations,” Brooks said. “There was an attitude among the Congress that African Americans should simply be happy with being freed.”

The Emancipation Proclamation had established that all enslaved people in Confederate states “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”

But white supremacy and racism continued.

“It just wasn’t, as though the battlefield had leveled the playing field when it came to race” Mitch McConnell observed. When Americans had the opportunity, we rejected it out of hand.

Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. discussed the lost opportunity in The Root, as reported by NPR.

“Try to imagine how profoundly different the history of race relations in the United States would have been had this policy been implemented and enforced; had the former slaves actually had access to the ownership of land, of property; if they had had a chance to be self-sufficient economically, to build, accrue and pass on wealth,” he wrote. “After all, one of the principal promises of America was the possibility of average people being able to own land, and all that such ownership entailed. As we know all too well, this promise was not to be realized for the overwhelming majority of the nation’s former slaves, who numbered about 3.9 million.”

“Some people” wrote George Bernard Shaw “see things and say why? But I dream things that never were, and I say, why not?”

The answer is obvious.

Chuck Ardo is a retired political consultant in Lancaster, Ohio. He previously served as press secretary to former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell.

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