Andrew Johnson

Andrew Johnson appears in the book’s account of Reconstruction at a decisive point in the struggle over whether the end of slavery would also transform the South’s economic order. In 1865, he revoked William T. Sherman’s orders offering freed slaves forty acres and a mule. The promised redistribution did not take place, leaving land concentrated in the hands of the planter class and helping sustain the old South’s extractive institutions.

Reconstruction and the Land Question

The book presents emancipation and Black men’s right to vote as changes that might have opened the way to more inclusive political and economic institutions in the South. But formal changes did not, by themselves, secure political power or economic independence. The southern planters had lost the war, yet remained organized and retained ownership of the land—the material basis of their influence.

During the war, freed slaves had been offered the promise of forty acres and a mule, and some received land under Sherman’s campaigns. Johnson’s 1865 revocation of Sherman’s orders meant that this redistribution was not carried through. The reversal therefore mattered not simply as an administrative decision, but because it preserved the agricultural foundation on which the planter elite’s power rested.

Consequences for the South

The failure to redistribute land helped shape what the book describes as the redemption of the old South. Slavery was abolished and Black men were enfranchised, but Black political power and economic independence remained tenuous. Rather than a transition to inclusive institutions and broad-based prosperity, the South developed a new form of extraction under Jim Crow, while plantation-style agriculture continued to rely on low-wage, poorly educated labor.

The book’s account links Johnson’s reversal to the wider persistence of the planter elite: the old landholding class survived defeat and retained the resources needed to reassert its influence. The promised land thus represents a crucial unrealized possibility in Reconstruction. Without a lasting change in land ownership, emancipation did not dismantle the economic structure that had sustained aristocratic power.