AZrailwhale
Diamond Member
No one was promised forty acres and a mule. That's an urban legend.They were also promised 40 acres and a mule. How many of them had ever been to Africa and what country in Africa were they going to return to. Of course they did, most folks who have helped build something loves it. Did Jewish folks love Germany in 1945? How many love it today?
From Wikki:
"Forty acres and a mule refers to a key part of Special Field Orders, No. 15 (series 1865), a wartime order proclaimed by Union general William Tecumseh Sherman on January 16, 1865, during the American Civil War, to allot land to some freed families, in plots of land no larger than 40 acres. Sherman later ordered the army to lend mules for the agrarian reform effort. The field orders followed a series of conversations between Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton and Radical Republican abolitionists Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens following disruptions to the institution of slavery provoked by the American Civil War. They provided for the confiscation of 400,000 acres (160,000 ha) of land along the Atlantic coast of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida and the dividing of it into parcels of not more than 40 acres on which were to be settled approximately 18,000 formerly enslaved families and other black people then living in the area."
Sherman didn't have the authority to make such a promise, and it was rescinded four months later.