Report reveals how formerly enslaved people were ousted from land received after Civil War

After the Civil War, the federal government’s pledge of 40 acres and a mule to the formerly enslaved has been known as a broken promise. But a new report reveals that not only did the government grant land to hundreds of people, it also took that land back and returned it to white southerners. Amna Nawaz discussed more with Alexia Fernández Campbell of the Center for Public Integrity.

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Amna Nawaz: After the Civil War, the federal government’s pledge of 40 acres and a mule to the formerly enslaved has long been known as a broken promise.

But a new investigative report reveals that not only did the government grant land to hundreds of formerly enslaved people; it also took that land back and returned it to white Southerners. That two-year reporting project done by the Center for Public Integrity, Reveal, and Mother Jones is now the largest collection of land titles from the 40 acres program ever to be analyzed and published.

I spoke recently with Alexia Fernandez Campbell, a senior investigative reporter at the Center for Public Integrity.

Alexia, welcome. Thanks so much for being here.

Alexia Fernandez Campbell, Center for Public Integrity: I’m so happy to be here.

Amna Nawaz: So take me back to the fall of 2021. You were working on an entirely different project unrelated to this. You’re digging through the digital archives at the Smithsonian, and you come across the name Fergus Wilson on an 1865 document.

How does that change the course of your reporting?

Alexia Fernandez Campbell: So, I didn’t immediately realize what I was looking at.

I did some Googling. I’m like, this is the 40 acres program. And I was thinking, but everything I knew about it was that it was a promise that was never kept. It’s something that didn’t happen. So, to me, like, that disconnect where like, oh, there are land titles. I don’t think this is common knowledge.

Amna Nawaz: So a lot of folks have heard this phrase, right, 40 acres and a mule. As you say, a lot of people thought, OK, this just never happened. And your reporting is called “40 Acres and a Lie.”

What’s the truth behind this program? What do people not know?

Alexia Fernandez Campbell: What people don’t know is that there were — it wasn’t just a promise that was broken. People who received land titles, we found more than 1,250 people who got land titles, men and women, they picked out their plots of land, mostly on the plantations where they were enslaved.

Actually, not everyone got 40 acres, which is another misconception. It was up to 40 acres. And then people were living there. They were planting their crops. They were selling them in Savannah. Some of them formed governments, elected a sheriff. They were living their lives, and they lived there for like up to a year-and-a-half before they were kicked off.

Amna Nawaz: They were kicked off.

I want to stop you there so you can tell us a little bit more and also remind people what it took you to get to the point of finding those 1,200 people that you did. You and your reporting team, you reviewed thousands of records. You conducted hours of genealogical research.

You even employed artificial intelligence to sort through the millions of documents online. You mentioned these families. And we’re talking about a stretch of land in Georgia and South Carolina, we should point out. How did they get kicked off the land that the government gave them?

Alexia Fernandez Campbell: Basically, because Lincoln was assassinated.

I mean, they had promised this land. They gave land titles. The government said, this is yours. You deserve it. You’re going to keep it. But Congress needed to make those titles permanent. They had a majority in Congress who were willing to do it, but Andrew Johnson, he was the vice president. He was a white supremacist.

He sided with the planters who wanted their land back, and he vetoed every effort to make those land titles permanent.

Amna Nawaz: So how were those families removed? They were literally forcibly removed from the land?

(Crosstalk)

Alexia Fernandez Campbell: Some of them were. Some of them revolted. Some of them were pressured to sign work contracts basically to work for their former enslaver. And some just said no way, and they left.

Amna Nawaz: I want to name some of the people you uncovered here, because their names have otherwise been lost to history.

Fergus Wilson is one. Jim Hutchinson is another. Pompey Jackson is a third. You managed to track down some of their descendants as well. Did they know about the land and the history you’re sharing with us now?

Alexia Fernandez Campbell: A lot of them did not.

And I even spoke with one descendant who has been researching her family diligently. She lived with her great-grandmother, who was Pompey’s daughter. And even she thinks her daughter — his daughter didn’t know. So she was amazed to hear this history.

Amna Nawaz: You did a little more research to talk about the value of the land. This is an important part of your reporting here.

One four-acre lot that you identified in Jacksonville, Florida, based on a sale last year, that it would — today, 40 acres would be worth $2.5 million there. It’s not just the land that was lost here in your reporting. Tell me about what else you found.

Alexia Fernandez Campbell: Yes, well just that generational wealth that wasn’t passed on. This 40 acres land was all the coast. It’s like expensive coastal real estate.

We found gated communities, golf courses and restaurants, incredibly valuable lands. This is wealth that was not passed on. And that’s kind of what we’re trying to show is the impact. This is not a history lesson only. It’s the impact on people who are alive today.

Amna Nawaz: The people who live there now, the communities that are there now, is any of this history part of what they know? Are they aware of it?

Alexia Fernandez Campbell: No, absolutely not.

It was very jarring for me to go to some places where it’s — there’s no sign. Other than the Habersham Plantation gated community. That’s, I guess, that sign. But as far as the 40 acres that it was given to someone and taken back, there’s zero signs.

Amna Nawaz: Do you have any way of calculating the full loss of generational wealth here?

Alexia Fernandez Campbell: That was actually one of the hardest things to do. We wanted to, because there were like 75 plantations more where the land titles were handed out, but we couldn’t find maps for all these old plantations to figure out exactly where they were.

So we had to just use these examples. And the examples we found, some of them were, like, shocking, like you said, millions of dollars for 40 acres today.

Amna Nawaz: So, when you speak to descendants of these families, what kind of reaction did you get? I mean, knowing about the generational wealth that was lost, about the historical injustice that transpired here, what are their reactions today?

Alexia Fernandez Campbell: People have had a lot of different reactions.

I would say a very common one was the cynicism, kind of like, yes, of course, the government took it away. Like, of course, we would be given land and my ancestors would be given land and it would be taken away. That was just the beginning of many hundreds of years of injustices against the Black Americans.

So, a lot of people were not surprised. There were some people who were surprised to find out they were personally connected to that history, but no one was surprised that the land was taken back.

Amna Nawaz: There is a sort of what now component to all this, right? Is there a way to correct a historical injustice like this?

Alexia Fernandez Campbell: Some people have been asking if there’s any legal recourse. Everyone we spoke to, the experts, said that, because they weren’t permanent titles, that they needed to be basically ratified by Congress, there’s no legal recourse.

But no one’s ever challenged a situation like theirs in court. However, there are people we spoke to who think that there is a moral issue here. It’s such a glaring injustice. And there are people with names who got land titles and descendants. Like, it’s not just some abstract idea. Like, people lost this wealth, and that maybe there’s a moral claim for, like, reparations or something that.

Amna Nawaz: It’s just a remarkable piece of reporting, I know a labor of love for you and your team, 2.5 years of work there.

Alexia Fernandez Campbell: Yes.

Amna Nawaz: It’s online now for anyone who wants to read the whole thing, “40 Acres and a Lie.”

Alexia Fernandez Campbell, thank you so much for joining us today.

Alexia Fernandez Campbell: Thanks for having me.