Final answer:
Special Field Order No. 15 was issued by General Sherman to grant freed slaves forty acres of land each as a temporary wartime measure to address the refuge problem, resulting in the phrase 'forty acres and a mule.'
Step-by-step explanation:
Union General William Sherman's Special Field Order No. 15, issued shortly after discussions with former slaves and the Union's capture of Savannah, was intended to address the immediate needs of thousands of newly freed African Americans during the American Civil War. Sherman's order designated about 400,000 acres of confiscated Southern land, stretching from Charleston, South Carolina, down to Jacksonville, Florida, for the settlement of freed slaves.
Each family of freedpeople was entitled to forty acres of land, and Sherman later indicated the possibility of providing the army's old mules to those who took up the offer, leading to the phrase "forty acres and a mule". This initiative represented a temporary wartime measure to solve the refugee problem but also set the expectation among former slaves of a U.S. government-supported land redistribution policy. However, President Andrew Johnson's decision to reverse Sherman's orders returned the land to its pre-war owners and dashed the hopes of establishing an independent black yeomanry.