forty acres and a mule

Examples of forty acres and a mule in the following topics:

• The Freed Slaves

  • The policy became known as "forty acres and a mule."
  • Because of this, the phrase "forty acres and a mule" has come to represent the failure of Reconstruction policies in restoring to African Americans the fruits of their labor.
  • Freedmen had a strong desire to learn to read and write.
  • As a result, political participation by most blacks and many poor whites began to decrease.
  • The Klan initiated a campaign of intimidation directed against blacks and sympathetic whites.

• Agriculture, Tenancy, and the Environment

  • White Southerners showed a reluctance to move North, or to move to cities, so the number of small farms proliferated, and they became smaller and smaller as the population grew.
  • When slavery ended, the large slave-based plantations were mostly subdivided into tenant or sharecropper farms of 20 to 40 acres.
  • Sharecropping was a way for very poor farmers, both white and black, to earn a living from land owned by someone else.
  • The landowner provided land, housing, tools, and seed (and perhaps a mule), and a local merchant provided food and supplies on credit.
  • Unlike sharecroppers, who were given all resources by the landowner, tenant farmers rented the land, provided their own tools and mule, and received half the crop.

• African American Migration

  • To escape the Ku Klux Klan, the White League, and the Jim Crow laws, which continued to make them second-class citizens after Reconstruction, as many as forty thousand Exodusters left the South to settle in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Colorado.
  • In the 1880s, blacks bought more than 20,000 acres of land in Kansas, and several of the settlements made during this time still exist today (such as Nicodemus, Kansas, founded in 1877).
  • This sudden wave of migration came as a great surprise to many white Americans, who did not realize that black southerners were free in name only.
  • The Kansas Fever Exodus refers specifically to six thousand blacks who moved from Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas to Kansas.
  • Indeed, Frederick Douglass was a critic of the movement.

• Land Policy

  • In 1793, France and Britain declared war on each other, thrusting the United States, a primary trading partner with both nations, into a difficult situation.
  • Led by a large community of American settlers, Texas declared its independence from Mexico in 1842 and became a republic.
  • The United States agreed to the Alaska Purchase from the Russian Empire for $7,200,000 (2 cents per acre), on March 30, 1867 in order to create a vital refueling station for ships trading with Asia.
  • The land went through several administrative changes before becoming an organized territory on May 11, 1912 and the forty-ninth state in 1959.
  • After World War II, the United States recognized Guam as a strategically placed island and began to construct a military base there--bring a large influx of people from various foreign populations.

• The Diversity of the West

  • To escape the Ku Klux Klan, the White League, and the Jim Crow laws, which continued to make them second-class citizens after Reconstruction, as many as forty thousand Exodusters left the South to settle in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Colorado.
  • In the 1880s, blacks bought more than 20,000 acres of land in Kansas, and several of the settlements made during this time still exist today (such as Nicodemus, Kansas, founded in 1877).
  • In response, some Hispanics joined labor unions, and in a few cases, led revolts.
  • Starting around 1859 in Texas, Juan Cortina led a 20-year campaign against Texas land grabbers and the Texas Rangers.
  • On the other hand, workers from Catholic countries, such as Ireland and Germany, were subject to a number of prejudices.