By Kevin D. Williams, Attorney at Law The phrase “forty acres and a mule” is often treated as shorthand for a promise that was never quite made. That is not historically precise. In January 1865, Union General William T. Sherman issued Special Field Orders No. 15, reserving a strip of coastal land from Charleston, South Carolina, to the St. Johns River in Florida for settlement by formerly enslaved people. The order referred to the “abandoned and confiscated lands” along the