How did the northerners and southerners react to general Sherman's plan to give the freed land to the African Americans

Forty acres (16.58 hectares) and a mule is the first compensation that attempted to repair the slaves of the US On January 16, 1865, at the end of the Civil War (1860-1865) between a south slavery and a north favorable to the abolition of slavery, General William T. Sherman issued Special Field Order number 15. He released thousands and thousands of slaves that overflowed the government to escape the plantations to follow the army of the Union. With the approval of the War Department, Sherman then tried to establish a black settlement in Georgia and on the coast of South Carolina. Each family would receive the famous 40 acres there, and the army mules were added to loan. In six months, some 40,000 freed slaves settled on hundreds of thousands of acres of land. Many months later, Congress approved a project to create the so-called Bureau of Free Men to oversee that transition from slavery to freedom. That office had 850,000 acres (3.4 million hectares) of abandoned and confiscated land under its control.

But Andrew Johnson, who ruled the country between 1865 and 1869, allowed the slave owners to reclaim their properties in the south of the country and with that ended that attempt of reparation. What followed were simple and pure attempts at reparation. The republican legislator Thaddeus Stevens wanted to introduce without luck in Congress a law of reparation in the early 1870. In 1915, the citizen Cornelius Jones prosecuted the US government for taking advantage of slave labor through the federal tax on cotton.