Rumors of land: the unfulfilled dream of "forty acres and a mule.".

• Author: Ehrenfreund, Max
• Position: Column

In January 1865, the famous General William Sherman met with Edwin Stanton, Abraham Lincoln's secretary of war, and twenty black church leaders in his quarters in Savannah, Georgia. The purpose of the meeting was to decide how to provide for the thousands of freed slaves--known as "contraband"--following the Union army in its slow march across the South. A few days later, Sherman ordered that forty acres of land along the coast, from Charleston, South Carolina, to St. Johns, Florida, be given to each family of former slaves trailing in the army's wake. The army would also loan draft animals to those families to use on their farms.

As winter turned into spring, a rumor that all freed slaves had been promised "forty acres and a mule" spread like warm weather through the Southern states. In the years to come, the phrase came to represent first a promise of a better society for blacks in the South and then a fading memory of what might have been, preserved in the stories of elderly former slaves, in textbooks, and eventually in the riffs and rhythms of modern black pop culture.

But it was only a rumor. The government never actually promised anyone forty acres and a mule. Sherman's order was explicitly temporary, pending a final decision from Congress on the status of the land, and even then it applied only to a small fraction of freedmen.

He wasn't the only Union army officer to look for a way to settle the former slaves. Meanwhile, in the North, some radical Republicans, including the vociferous Thaddeus Stevens, representative from Pennsylvania, supported the idea of giving all freed slaves land in forty-acre plots, which had been the standard division of land in the rural United States since the Northwest Ordinance. They believed that "black men and black families needed an economic stake, if freedom was going to be real, if freedom was going to be maintained in any meaningful way," says Roy Finkenbine, a history professor at the University of Detroit Mercy.

While these proposals were never seriously considered, the rumors still flew. "I picked out my mule. All of us did," Sam McAllum, a freed slave, said later, looking back on the end of the war. Plantation owners reported seeing former slaves walking the fields with stakes and balls of twine in anticipation of the Union army's arrival, marking their claim on their piece of the land they'd spent their lives working.

But in the summer of 1865, President Andrew Johnson began giving parcels of...