Depending on where you grew up, your middle or high school history teachers may have taught you about “40 Acres and a Mule.” A very brief explainer in case they didn’t – 40 Acres and a Mule refers to a wartime order by Union General William T. Sherman 1865 – following President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which ordered the independence of formerly enslaved Black people in the U.S.
It was a part of Special Field Orders No. 15, and promised freed Black people at most 40 acres of land, and mules to temporarily help tend to that land. However, it’s been widely accepted that most of that land never made it to those individuals, that it was restored to its pre-war white owners after Lincoln’s assassination and never got handed over to those who were freed.
That was the case for many, but not for all. A new deep dive into genealogical and archival records shows that some freed slaves did receive land grants. Who owns those lands now? And do the ancestors of those who received land know there were actual pieces of paper given out that said it belonged to their family members?
40 Acres and a Lie is a joint project between Mother Jones, the Center for Public Integrity and Reveal. It’s been compiled into a print report for Mother Jones, as well as a three-part series from Reveal which will air tonight on KGNU at 4 p.m.
Alexia Fernández Campbell is an investigative reporter in Washington, D.C., most recently at the Center for Public Integrity. She kickstarted the project and, after two-and-a-half years, is relieved that it’s finished and eager for people to listen and learn. I spoke with her last week, the day that Mother Jones launched the report. We talked about the research behind the report, their use of AI to track down the people affected, and what it could mean for Black Americans seeking reparations.
You can find Part 1 of the Reveal audio series here, and the Mother Jones visual report here.
The first episode of the three-part Reveal series also plays tonight at 4 p.m. on KGNU.
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Untitled Jackie Sedley
Transcript:
Jackie Sedley: This is the Morning Magazine. I’m Jackie Sedley. Depending on where you grew up, your middle or high school history teachers may have taught you about 40 acres and a Mule. I’ll give you a very brief explainer in case they didn’t: 40 Acres and a Mule refers to a wartime order by Union General William T. Sherman in 1865, following President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which ordered the independence of formerly enslaved black people in the United States. It was part of Special Field Orders No. 15, and promised freed black people at most 40 acres of land and mules to temporarily help tend to that land.
However, it’s been widely accepted that most of that land never made it to those individuals, that it was restored to its pre-war white owners after Lincoln’s assassination, and never got handed over to those who were freed.
That was the case for many, but not for all. A new deep dive into genealogical and archival records shows that some freed slaves did receive land grants.
So, who owns those lands now? And do the ancestors of those who received land know there were actual pieces of paper given out saying it belonged to their family members?
40 Acres and a Lie is a joint project between Mother Jones, the Center for Public Integrity, and Reveal. It’s been compiled into a print report for Mother Jones, as well as a three part series from Reveal, which will air tonight on KGNU at 4 p.m.
Alexia Fernández Campbell is an investigative reporter in Washington, D. C., most recently at the Center for Public Integrity. She kick started the project and, after two-and-a-half years, is relieved that it’s finished and eager for people to listen and learn. I spoke with her last week, the day that Mother Jones launched the report. We talked about the research behind the report, their use of AI to track down the people affected, and what it could mean for Black Americans seeking reparations.
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Jackie Sedley: Let’s just get right into it. So 40 Acres and a Lie, this new joint project between Mother Jones, the Center for Public Integrity and Reveal. Let’s start a bit from the beginning. I know that you’ve been working on this project for about two and a half years now. Where did that start? Where did the idea start and how did, how did it come to fruition for you?
Alexia Fernández Campbell: Yeah, it’s, it’s kind of wild because I don’t, this is not like a subject that I am familiar with. I normally cover like labor issues, but I was working with my colleagues who were on a different project altogether. It was related to Black land loss, and I was tasked with finding certain records that could help us locate different black settlements in the U. S. Anyways, after speaking with someone who said, you know what, there are some land records in the Freedmen’s Bureau. Documents at the National Archives. You should check that place out. And I’ve like never heard of the Freedman’s Bureau before, which is embarrassing. But I was soon, like in their digital archives, just like looking through stuff. And I find these images that look just, there’s black and white images of some papers that look like torn and crumpled, kind of like what you’d imagine like a treasure map would look like except just writing and not a map. It was like very interesting. So I look closely and it said 40 acres has been issued to Bergus Wilson on Sappalo Island, Georgia.
And there were like there were dozens of these land titles and it was like in a digital folder that was labeled “miscellaneous.” So these have been buried for there for more than 100 years. I thought it could be the 40 Acres and a Mule program because all, most of the land titles were for 40 acres. There were some that were for 30 and some even for 15 and less, but then I started Googling because it said under these orders of Sherman’s Special Field Orders No. 15, which is the official name of the 40 Acres program.
And I’m like, “What? People got land titles?” Because everything that I had understood about 40 Acres and a Mule, which I didn’t really know much about, was that it was a promise that was made to freed people as kind of like reparations in some cases, some people view it that way, but just as to have land after slavery.
And that it was a promise that was broken, it was never kept, so I’m like, people got land titles, and I couldn’t find anyone else who had written about this or at least not named so many people, so we kept looking, we kept finding more and more names.
Sedley: Wow. So you kept finding these names. What was the next step? The investigative reporting of this all must have been really exciting, but also overwhelming if nobody else had touched on it. You don’t really have a roadmap for it.
Campbell: Yeah, so I just want to be clear. There have been historians who have before they were made digital, physically, but it was hard.
Like you had to physically go to Washington, D. C. to the National Archives, and, and know what you were looking for, because they’re not just going to let you roam around the Freedmen’s Bureau records you had to know what, it’s like 1. 8 million documents, you had to know what to look for.
Some people had seen some of the names, but we’d never, I’ve never seen these land titles published, and, and so the first step was I pitched this idea to my editors. “What if we do genealogical research, and try to find living descendants. Wouldn’t that be such a cool story to tell?” And my editors are like, “What, you think you can do genealogical research?” Like, they’re very skeptical. Everyone’s super excited. Everyone’s champed in this idea, but they’re very skeptical that we’d be able to find any living descendants. And so I talked to a genealogist at the Smithsonian and she gave me ideas.
She’s like, “I think you can do it. You’re definitely not going to find everyone’s descendants, but you’ll find some.” And so it was painful, that process, having to learn how to do that. But we did, we found like 41 living descendants and six of them agreed to do interviews and, and that’s kind of where the story went.
Sedley: And so tell me more about that story. So you linked up with these descendants you spoke with?
Campbell: Mm-Hmm.
Sedley: How many did you say?
Campbell: Six of them.
Sedley: Six.
Campbell: Um, yeah. So it’s interesting because I focused on Georgia, people who got land in Georgia, and my colleague April Simpson focused on people who got land in South Carolina, and the descendants that she spoke to are still there in that area where they got their 40 acres and then lost it, And they’re still there. And then the people I found had, had left, like some, one family migrated because of Jim Crow. Not only did they not get their 40 acres, they’re like, “We’re leaving Georgia altogether,” you know, which was a common thing at the time, especially during Jim Crow. And then another descendant was in North Carolina. So it’s, it was, it really showed us how much the story is a national story because even though 40 acres is very limited to South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, where the, where that land was set aside, it impacts so many people alive today. And that’s what we wanted to show that this is not a history lesson.
The point was to show how the betrayal of the federal government who gave the land back to their enslavers after some of – we found one freed man who had been living on his land for a year-and-a-half before, and then it was given back. So some of them stayed there from six months to a year and a half before they were eventually kicked off for good. So we found a lot of descendants all over the country like in Michigan Ohio, California, New York just like everywhere, so to me, it showed something that I knew that this was a story that was more than just about the south.
Sedley: And when you approached these descendants and you spoke to them, were they surprised that you were asking them about this from an investigative perspective? Did they have an impression or an understanding that this was something that people knew about? Did they kind of just accept it as a part of their history or were they also really eager to talk about it?
Campbell: Yeah, so I was worried at first that people might not wanna talk, and I’m sure maybe some people who didn’t respond, maybe they didn’t wanna talk about it.
But the people who did respond were really excited to talk about it and learn more. They were people who wanted to learn, you know, because this is a painful history for so many people. So I was like, surely some people are not gonna wanna dig that up. But some people did and they wanted to talk about it. It was a variety of people. Like one woman knew that her great grandfather had gotten 40 acres because a professor had been doing a study on Reconstruction and found his name in those Freedom Bureau records, but she had never seen his land title.
So I showed the land title and it’s weird because so many people seem surprised about that connection. “Oh, my God, my, I can’t believe my ancestor got 40 acres.” So they’re surprised on one hand, but then they’re also like not surprised about what happened. It was just kind of like, “Yeah, of course the federal government would do that. We’re so used to being, like, screwed over.” That was a very common sentiment. It wasn’t outrage. It was just like, “Yeah, of course this would happen.”
You know, and then when we talk about reparations, a very cynical view about whether anyone would ever provide them with any sort of compensation for this land that was taken away.
Sedley: So just to clarify, the folks that you spoke with knew the history of the land?
Campbell: Some did. Some had no clue.
Sedley: Wow. And that makes you wonder, right, how many stories like this have faded into the background because the people that it affects the most directly have not been made aware over time or it got lost in translation and then there’s reporters like you who uncover it. Did you feel tasked with this when you discovered these documents? Was, was there any thought in your mind of, “Wow, I’m about to tell people about a part of their history that they’ve never been made aware of?”
Campbell: I realized that this was probably going to be news to a lot of people that we spoke to just because, I started reading everything I could about this program and there’s not a lot written about it.
There were a few people, historians who are very, very, narrow expertise on this program and a lot of them are dead. There’s 2 historians alive today that we interviewed who even know that land titles were handed out and had seen some of the names, but no one that we interviewed had ever put together all these names.
So, yeah, it definitely, I knew it was going to be news to people but what I didn’t know was if this was gonna be painful news, because it’s not, “Hey, guess what? Your ancestor won the lottery!” It’s like, “Yeah, look, your ancestor is part of 40 Acres and a Mule.” And obviously we know it didn’t end up working out in any way. So, I didn’t know how they were going to take it. And I was surprised that the people we did speak to wanted, really wanted to know everything. They wanted to know everything we found. And for me, it was just very rewarding to be able to share that history because I was doing genealogical work and I was looking for documents, trying to build that story, the narrative of what happened over generations and they loved hearing about it. But yeah, I didn’t know how everyone was gonna take it.
Sedley: I was going to ask what some of the most time intensive parts were, but it sounds like the fact checking?
Campbell: It was just like relentless, we’d be getting emails with a bombarding with questions of, like, where’d you get this? Where’d you get this? And the time intensive part was the genealogical research which I didn’t realize. Obviously all documents at that era are handwritten, most of them, and I actually learned how to read and write in cursive, but this is not the kind of cursive that was from, like, 1865. That is a totally different thing. It’s impossible to read. I had to train myself to read it. Luckily, the Smithsonian has volunteers who are transcribing these records like as we speak.
They don’t have them all transcribed, but that to me was the most time intensive because trying to find documents of people who were enslaved is, you know, it seems obvious when I say it now, it’s like, really difficult. The federal government didn’t have any records. There were no birth certificates. So there’s no official spelling for their names. So I find their names misspelled or just spelled differently in different records. And then they didn’t know their birthdays, didn’t know how to read and write. So, they kind of guess what year they were born. And so on different records, it shows like a, you know, eight year difference on like when they were born and like the birth month is different. I just wanted to make sure I had the right person. So I had to kind of just focus on a few freed men because there were some where I was like, I can’t be 100 percent certain that this is the same person. So, to me, that was the most time intensive part. That’s why it took us two-and-a-half years to do this.
Sedley: And that is something that comes up a lot in newsrooms across the country, across the world, especially in this era of fake news, of a lot of seeds sown, of distrust with the media. I would imagine that with a project like this, the fact checking is so crucial, because if you make one slip up, one error, the entire thing can be called a myth, right?
Campbell: Absolutely. And, you know, Nikole Hannah-Jones and her 1619 project for the New York Times was an inspiration for us to pursue this story. And I know how much work she must have put into that and there was just one slight clarification she had to make and that people tried to use that as a reason to discredit her whole, all her work. So we were very much aware of we cannot have any errors in this story that people can latch on to and try to discredit everything we’ve done. So, we were definitely been like laser-focused on making sure there’s no one could ever say that any part of this is incorrect.
Sedley: What do you hope people take away from this project? Obviously, releasing it during Juneteenth is, from the people I’ve spoken to, often a complicated time of celebration and also a reckoning with where we’re at and how far we do still have to go with regard to racial equality and injustice in this country. So what do you hope people take away from it at this time?
Campbell: Yeah, well, there are two things. First, we published the list of names. We found 1,250 people who got land titles. So number one, we want it to be a service where people can go through, look at those names. We already, an editor at Mother Jones already said he found his uncle’s great grandfather on that list, which I never would have imagined because I don’t even know my great-grandparents names.
But I know lots of people do, so we want it to be a service where people who want to know if they have a connection to that history, and they could be anywhere in the country because we know lots of descendants migrated all over the country. We want them to be able to see if there’s that connection, if they want to.
And then for people who, who, you know, may not have ancestors who are directly related to this program. We want people to kind of take away and see how history is not just like something from the past, but that it impacts people. You know, who are alive today, this was generational wealth that was not passed on.
We went to one community where people got land titles and then lost that land that is now really very wealthy and gated community near Savannah, near the beach. It’s absolutely stunning. 40 acres of land, just the land without the homes, is worth like 2 million. So this is generational wealth that was not passed on.
And we wanted people to see how that impacts people today. And we did the best we could, but I think, you know, hopefully people will see that.
Sedley: Was there any goal with this project for reclamation of that land for people? Is that something that’s even possible?
Campbell: Yeah, we definitely think that it can forward the conversation around reparations for slavery. We know there are a lot of local governments doing very targeted reparations programs, but nothing at the federal level has happened yet, so we feel like this could forward that conversation around reparations from the federal government, because it was the federal government who revoked the program.
So if anyone’s to blame here, it’s the federal government and not really anyone else for how, how this played out. So we did speak to experts, legal experts, and even legal historian and the problem with those land titles is that they were possessory land titles. They didn’t convey ownership. They were issued by the military general, and it was basically saying you have the right to possess this land that we confiscated from Confederates. You have the right to possess it. Work it, own it, no one can interfere or go on your land if you don’t want them to, until Congress and the President basically confer ownership.
The status of ownership had to come from Congress and the President. That was a problem. So, it never actually conveyed full ownership and, you know, the Freedmen’s Bureau kept telling freed men, “Yeah, yeah, this is going to be your land.” They thought Congress was going to do it, but the problem was that Lincoln was assassinated and his vice president Andrew Johnson was a sympathizer with the Confederates and white supremacists, and he definitely caved in to their pleas to get their land back.
And so, technically, they don’t have a claim to that land, but people we spoke to said, there could be a more moral claim here to that land that people should be compensated because it wasn’t just a promise. It was a program. It wasn’t something just spoken people received land. They were literally told by the government that it was theirs and they deserved it and they’re going to be able to keep it. So, even if the title didn’t say that, people said that to them, and I think that’s more of, what the reality is, whether anyone could claim any compensation for this.
Sedley: Do you have a favorite memory that comes to mind reflecting on this project? Whether it’s a moment that was heartwarming, enlightening, shocking?
Campbell: Yeah, actually I just got an email from a staff member at the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives and she’s been overseeing efforts to Put the Freedmen’s Bureau records online, and she’s the one in charge of them getting transcribed, and she’s the one who encouraged me to pursue this project, because before she was a genealogist at the National Museum of African American History, and she just emailed me, and it was the sweetest email, and I’m like, oh, this is why we did this.
She’s like, “I’ve been trying, putting these records online. This is, this is why everything I envisioned that people would do with these, these records, I spent my whole career trying to make these records accessible and seeing what you guys did. It just blew my mind. Thank you so much. We want these stories to be told.” And I’m like, I’m even getting teary eyed right now just thinking of it. And I was like, yes, this is just a reminder of this does matter to so many people, even if. Maybe someone doesn’t have a direct connection, but to so many Americans, especially Black Americans, being able to mine these records has been pretty, pretty amazing. And I would say that’s probably my favorite response. To the, to the series.
Sedley: Those are all of my questions. Is there anything else that you’d like to add that we didn’t touch on?
Campbell: I just wanna add that one of my colleagues, one of the ways we found these records was he used AI and it’s kind of like facial recognition where I found some of the titles and names, and then basically he, he trained an AI model to look at this land title and search these 1.8 million records and see if you can find other ones. And so he found like 100 more land titles. And then the log with people’s names, he trained the AI to try to find more logs that look like this. And I just thought that was so cool. And he created this tool that you can search the Freedmen’s Bureau records, the parts that are transcribed, and you can do this kind of image recognition. So for anyone who’s just curious about what this looks like I would go to motherjones.com and see, especially if you have ancestors you think might be in there because they were enslaved. You might find something you didn’t know was in there.
Sedley: That’s fascinating to me because AI, and especially facial recognition, is often pointed out, especially in marginalized communities, as a tool that’s used by the government to marginalize you and oppress you, and so for this project to use a system like that kind of feels like an F-you or a reclamation of those systems, right?
Campbell: I know, it’s wild because yeah, there’s been so many like doomsday scenarios and, obviously, like you said, in case of facial recognition has been used in in ways that marginalize people. So I think it’s pretty fascinating.
