Final answer:
The promise of 'forty acres and a mule' was not fulfilled as President Andrew Johnson overturned Sherman's order, reinstating the land to former Confederates. Approximately 40,000 freedmen were initially settled, but the comprehensive land redistribution did not materialize, leading to a prevalence of sharecropping rather than land ownership among African Americans.
Step-by-step explanation:
General William T. Sherman's Special Field Order No. 15 created a significant expectation among freedpeople by setting aside land to provide forty-acre plots and potentially an army mule to each family, as a temporary wartime measure to address the refugee problem following the Civil War. However, this promise was never fully realized. After President Lincoln's assassination, President Andrew Johnson reversed Sherman's order, returning the land back to the former Confederates and undermining the plan for land redistribution.
Despite the early success of settling around 40,000 freedpeople on this land, the reality was that the comprehensive vision of a self-sustained black yeomanry was quickly diminished, leading to a system of sharecropping that locked many into a cycle of debt and dependency.
Lands once set aside for redistribution were swiftly restored to their former owners, leaving behind a legacy of what could have been a significant change in the socio-economic status of African Americans in the post-war United States. The promise of "forty acres and a mule" remained largely an unfulfilled aspiration, failing to bring about the hoped-for transformation in the lives of the newly freed slaves. Instead, the legacy of this unfulfilled promise continued to influence issues of land ownership, economic opportunity, and racial equality in the ensuing decades.