40 ACRES AND A LIE

Less known is that the federal government actually did issue hundreds, perhaps thousands, of titles to specific plots of land between 4 and 40 acres-before ultimately changing course and returning the land to the plantation owners. "Having this kind of evidence-of actual families who received land and had that land taken away-certainly can address, in some measure, the issue of reparations," said Cook Bell, whose 2018 book, Claiming Freedom: Race, Kinship, and Land in Nineteenth-Century Georgia, documents life on lowcountry plantations such as Grove Hill. After surfacing the digitized land titles and logs entries, we conducted genealogical research to trace what happened to the descendants of these 1,250 men and women in the century and a half since Sherman 's promise was broken-reviewing thousands of Freedmen's Bureau bank records, marriage certificates, and census documents. The bill also created the Freedmen's Bureau, an agency charged with coordinating temporary housing, food, health care, education, and work for the 3 million formerly enslaved people across the nation.