NARRATOR
On January 11th, President Lincoln sent his Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, to Savannah. Stanton instructed General Sherman to set up a meeting with some of the city's black ministers. He wanted to hear how the freedmen imagined their future in the South. That evening, twenty black men entered the grand parlor as guests of Stanton and Sherman. Sixteen were former slaves. They chose Reverend Garrison Frazier, who'd purchased his freedom nine years earlier, to be their spokesman. For the first time, Federal officials conferred with freed slaves about the future of African Americans in the South.

BLIGHT
The exchange that occurs between Sherman, Stanton, and the Union generals, and Reverend Frazier, is one of the extraordinary moments of the Civil War and the ending of the Civil War, because they asked Frazier not just, "What should we do with all these refugees?" They asked him questions about what the war meant. They asked him questions about what the Emancipation Proclamation had meant. They asked him what the presence of black troops in the Union army meant. And, in many ways, you'll find no better definition of the meaning of the Civil War in the kinds of answers that Garrison Frazier gives that day in Savannah.

V/O Frazier
The freedom, as I understand it, promised by the [Emancipation] Proclamation is taking us from under the yoke of bondage, and placing us where we could reap the fruit of our own labor.

WALKER
To be a slave, as one of these ministers pointed out to General Sherman, was to be someone who had no control over his life's decisions. And now these people feel the need to express their abilities, their choices.

V/O Frazier
"The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land... and we can soon maintain ourselves and have something to spare. We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own."

BLIGHT
This was a man, who'd never left, probably, coastal Georgia in his life, but he understood the Declaration of Independence, he understood the Emancipation Proclamation. And beyond that, he said, in effect: You should give us our rights, and you should protect our rights, and then you should leave us alone and let us be citizens."

NARRATOR
Four days later, anxious to get thousands of freed slaves off his hands, and Washington off his back, General Sherman issued Special Field Order 15. It was only a temporary order, but it became one of the most controversial of the Civil War. Plantations in the rice country had been abandoned by white planters during the war. Four hundred thousand of these acres would be given over to African Americans for settlement. The huge land tract included the Sea Islands and parts of the Georgia and South Carolina coast.

FONER
Forty acres of land will be given out to each family. Plus, Sherman says, the Army's got tons of mules, which we don't really need. They're broken down from our long march. If any one wants a mule they can have one of these mules. This is the origin of that famous phrase, "forty acres and a mule."

BLIGHT
Here was a real revolution, a revolution in the land, on the land, a chance to be their own freeholders.

NARRATOR
For four million African Americans in the South, news of "forty acres and a mule" spread as fast as the contagion of freedom itself. Many saw this as proof that emancipation would finally give black men and women a true stake in the land they had toiled on for centuries.