The Reconstruction period[edit]
The arguments surrounding reparations are based on the formal discussion about many different reparations, and actual land reparations received by African Americans which were later taken away.
In 1865, after the Confederate States of America were defeated in the American Civil War, General William Tecumseh Sherman issued Special Field Orders, No. 15 to both "assure the harmony of action in the area of operations"[28] and to solve problems caused by the masses of freed slaves, a temporary plan granting each freed family forty acres of tillable land in the sea islands and around Charleston, South Carolina for the exclusive use of black people who had been enslaved. The army also had a number of unneeded mules which were given to freed slaves. Around 40,000 freed slaves were settled on 400,000 acres (1,600 km2) in Georgia and South Carolina. However, President Andrew Johnson reversed the order after Lincoln was assassinated, the land was returned to its previous owners, and the blacks were forced to leave. In 1867,
Thaddeus Stevens sponsored a bill for the redistribution of land to African Americans, but it did not pass.
Reconstruction came to an end in 1877 without the issue of reparations having been addressed. Thereafter, a deliberate movement of
segregation and oppression arose in southern states.
Jim Crow laws passed in some southeastern states to reinforce the existing inequality that slavery had produced. In addition white extremist organizations such as the
Ku Klux Klan engaged in a massive campaign of terrorism throughout the Southeast in order to keep African Americans in their prescribed social place. For decades this assumed inequality and injustice was ruled on in court decisions and debated in public discourse.
In one anomalous case, a former slave named
Henrietta Wood successfully sued for compensation after having been kidnapped from the
free state of
Ohio and sold into slavery in
Mississippi. After the American Civil War, she was freed and returned to
Cincinnati, where she won her case in
federal court in 1878, receiving $2,500 in damages. Though the verdict was a national news story, it did not prompt any trend toward additional similar cases.
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