Editing Forty acres and a mule (section)

====Significance====
The Sea Islands project reflected a policy of "40 acres and a mule" as the basis for post-slavery economics. Especially in 1865, the precedent it set was highly visible to newly free blacks seeking land of their own.<ref>{{harvnb|Williamson|1965|pp=54–55}}

<blockquote>'Forty acres and a mule', that delightful bit of myopic mythology so often ascribed to the newly freed in the Reconstruction period, at least in South Carolina during the spring and summer of 1865, represented far more than the chimerical rantings of the ignorant darkies, irresponsible soldiers", and radical politicians. On the contrary, it symbolized precisely the policy which the government had already given and was giving mass application in the Sea Islands. Hardly had the troops landed, in November, 1861, before liberal Northerners arrived to begin a series of ambitious experiment in the reconstruction of Southern society. One of these experiments included the redistribution of large landed estates to the Negroes. By the Spring of 1865, this program was well underway, and after August any well-informed intelligent observer in South Carolina would have concluded, as did the Negroes, that some considerable degree of permanent land division was highly probable.</blockquote></ref>

Freedpeople from across the region flocked to the area in search of land.<ref name=Oubre47>{{harvnb|Oubre|1978|pp=47–48}} "By summer of 1865, word of Sherman's Special Field Order, No. 15 had spread throughout the states covered by the order as well as to neighboring states. So great was the desire for land that blacks poured into the reservation in search of their forty-acre plots."</ref><ref name=Webster94 /> The result was refugee camps afflicted by disease and short on supplies.<ref name=Oubre47 /><ref>{{harvnb|Rose|1964|p=332}}</ref>

Especially after Sherman's Orders, the coastal settlements generated enthusiasm for a new society that would supplant the slave system. Reported one journalist in April 1865: "It was the Plymouth colony repeating itself. They agreed if any others came to join them, they should have equal privileges. So blooms the Mayflower on the South Atlantic Coast."<ref>{{harvnb|Rose|1964|p=331}}</ref>