We were taught in school that the first form of reparations to newly freed slaves after the Civil War was the promise of “40 acres and a mule.” I might be giving the benefit of the doubt that public schools actually taught this fact. I digress already. Nonetheless, Union General William T. Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15 was issued on Jan. 16, 1865, also known as “40 acres and a mule.” Can you imagine how red in the face the Confederate landowners looked? The federal government’s colossal redistribution of land to freed slaves was a radical thought in the 1800s. So radical that it would become the first systematic approach to “righting the wrongs” of slavery brutality. The part that public schools somehow left out of this part of American history is that black leaders actually bred this idea.

Sherman’s Order No. 15 was the direct outcome of a discussion he and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton had with 20 leaders of the black community in Savannah, Georgia. These 20 black leaders were all clergymen — mostly Baptist and Methodist. Eleven out of the 20 had been born free in slave states, of which 10 had lived as free men in the Confederacy during the course of the Civil War. They were free in heart, mind, and soul, and they came up with a revolutionary idea.

The conversation was recorded by Stanton. A transcript was given to Henry Ward Beecher, and it was printed in full on Feb. 13, 1865, in the New York Daily Tribune. Stanton suggested to Sherman that “the leaders of the Negro community” be gathered together and asked: “What do you want for your own people?” The appointed leader of the 20 clergymen, a Baptist minister named Garrison Frazier, told them that the Negro community wanted “Land!” What a novel idea.

Minister Frazier went on to say, “The way we can best take care of [ourselves], is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor and we can soon maintain ourselves and have something to spare. We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own.” When he was asked where the freed slaves “would rather live — whether scattered among the whites or in colonies by themselves,” he replied, “I would prefer to live by ourselves, for there is a prejudice against us in the South that will take years to get over.”

Four days later, General Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, after President Lincoln approved it.

Ninety days later, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865.

The next day, April 15, 1865, the racist Democrat Vice President, Andrew Johnson, was sworn in. He was an unschooled Southerner from Tennessee. In the blink of an eye and the pulling of a trigger by Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln died and so did hopes of land redistribution for over 400,000 freed slaves. As the fall season in 1865 came, President Johnson overturned Special Field Order No. 15, returning the land along the Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina coasts to the original owners.

Those courageous clergymen wanted land to till for themselves and their children’s children. They envisioned a life of generational wealth at the expense of their own sweat, blood, and tears. What does the Negro ask for today as reparations? A check in the mail. The 2020 campaign for the Left has reparations on its political platform. Unlike those 20 black clergymen, they see reparations as vengeance, entitlement, and social justice. I wonder what could have been for those freed slaves had Republican President Lincoln lived to see another day.