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On January 16, 1865, Major General William Tecumseh Sherman issued Special Field Orders No. 15, which one admiring biographer lauded as “the single most revolutionary act in race relations in the Civil War.” The order promised thousands of freedmen 40-acre parcels of land located in a 30-mile wide swath from Charleston south along the Atlantic coast to the St. Johns River in Florida. But Southern-sympathetic Northern politicians and even Sherman himself would come to betray the famous order that gave freedmen “40 acres and a mule,” and former slaves would be forced off the land their families had worked for generations.