Sherman's General Order No. 15 is presented through Lizzy Enders's family history as a postwar land measure with an immediate personal consequence: her parents lost their plantation and went to Independence, Missouri. Its importance in the novel lies not in a detailed account of its administration, but in the way a national decision enters one family's story of dispossession, dependence, and migration.

Purpose and Scope

In Lizzy's account, General William Tecumseh Sherman issued the order after the war with the intention of giving Black families forty acres each. The land was to lie along the coast and riverbanks in a stretch from Charleston, South Carolina, to Jacksonville, Florida. The novel supplies this scope as part of the explanation Lizzy heard from her parents, rather than as a broader history of how the policy was implemented.

The Enders Plantation

Lizzy says she had just been born when the order was issued. Her parents later told her that Sherman took their plantation and gave it to Black families. The account adds that the plantation had already been ruined, a detail that complicates the loss: the family was dispossessed of its home and property, but what it lost was no longer a thriving estate. The recollection nevertheless marks a decisive break in the family's circumstances.

Move to Independence

After losing the plantation, Lizzy's parents went to Independence, Missouri. Her mother's family gave her father work in its mercantile business, and the family lived in the large house belonging to her mother's relatives. Her mother's brother, Uncle William, was often away, so the house was mostly theirs. The move thus placed the family under the practical support of the maternal household, while Lizzy remembers her father as dejected because he could no longer provide a roof for his family on his own.

Place in the Family Story

The order establishes the economic vulnerability behind later changes in the Enders family's life. Although the family had lost much of its wealth, Lizzy's mother's relatives still owned Independence's largest mercantile business, and her uncles continued trading in furs, blankets from New Mexico, sheep, horses, and mules. A later robbery at the store deepened the family's sense that life in Independence had changed; eventually, Lizzy's father proposed going west to seek gold in Colorado. The text does not identify the order as the direct cause of that later decision, but the recollection makes clear that the family's westward story began after the plantation was lost and a new life had to be assembled in Independence.