Special Field Orders, No. 15 were military orders issued during the American Civil War, on January 16, 1865, by General William Tecumseh Sherman, commander of the Military Division of the Mississippi of the United States Army.[1] They provided for the confiscation of 400,000 acres (1,600 km²) of land along the Atlantic coast of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida and the dividing of it into 40-acre (0.16 km2) parcels, on which were to be settled approximately 18,000 freed slave families and other Blacks then living in the area.
The orders were issued following Sherman's March to the Sea. They were intended to address the immediate problem of dealing with the tens of thousands of black refugees who had joined Sherman's march in search of protection and sustenance, and "to assure the harmony of action in the area of operations".[2] General Sherman issued his orders after meeting in Savannah, Georgia with twenty ministers of the black community and with U.S. Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. Brig. Gen. Rufus Saxton, an abolitionist from Massachusetts who had previously organized the recruitment of black soldiers for the Union Army, was put in charge of implementing the orders.[3]
The orders had little concrete effect, as they were revoked in the fall of that same year by President Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Abraham Lincoln after his assassination.
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