On January 16, 1865, three months before General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, Major General William Tecumseh Sherman, commander of the Military Division of the Mississippi in Savannah, Georgia, issued his controversial Special Field Order No. 15. The fi eld order was inspired principally by the Union general’s determination to rid his army of the large number of escaped, destitute, and homeless slaves who accompanied his army’s fl anks as it marched across Georgia during his famous raid to the sea of the autumn of 1864. Sherman’s order set aside “the islands from Charleston, south, the abandoned rice fi elds along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. Johns River, Florida,” for the exclusive settlement of slave refugees. Sherman instructed Brigadier General Rufus Saxton to make available to each head of a black family forty acres of land and to “furnish … subject to the approval of the President of the United States, a possessory title.” The army was also to supply the freedpeople with farm animals.