Full Citation
Title: Essays on Race and the Persistence of Economic Inequality
Citation Type: Journal Article
Publication Year: 2010
ISBN: 9780511896712
ISSN:
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511896712
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Abstract: But the vision of "forty acres and a mule" - the righteous and reasonable ambition to become a landholder, which the nation had all but categorically promised the freedmen - was destined in most cases to bitter disappointment. -W.E.B. DuBois1 In January of 1865 General William Tecumseh Sherman authorized freed slaves to establish forty acre farms along parts of the South Carolina and Georgia coasts.2 He later provisioned them with broken down military mules. Although rumors of "forty acres and a mule" quickly spread among the South' s newly emancipated slaves, Sherman's order was soon revoked, and the land was largely restored to its Confederate owners.3 Both Reconstruction era policymakers and modern scholars have argued that the large and persistent gap between black and white income and wealth could have been reduced or eliminated if each freed slave family had been allocated "forty acres and a mule" following the Civil War. Other scholars, however, have questioned this conventional wisdom that land alone would have altered the economic conditions of former slaves.4 No previous quantitative investigation of these competing claims exists, primarily because researchers have thought there was little variation in policy toward freed slaves. Without a group of former slaves who were treated with access to free land, the . . .
Url: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40836702?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents
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Authors: Miller, Melinda
Periodical (Full): The Journal of Economic History
Issue: 2
Volume: 70
Pages: 468-472
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Other, Race and Ethnicity
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