William T. Sherman issues his Field Order No. 15, which set aside 400,000 acres of land confiscated from slaveholders in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida for settlement by African Americans. President Andrew Johnson later returned confiscated land to its former owners, and thousands of African Americans were removed from land previously promised to them by the government.
General William Tecumseh Sherman pushed back Confederate forces to capture and occupy Atlanta, Georgia. Sherman sent a telegraph to Washington: “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.”
William T. Sherman (1820–1891) was an important strategist and Union general during the American Civil War. Sherman graduated from West Point in 1840. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he did not see military action in the Mexican-American War. In 1859 he served as the superintendent of the Louisiana Military Seminary. Sherman left Louisiana when the state seceded from the Union in 1861 and was commissioned as a colonel in the Army. After initial faltering, Sherman rose through the ranks as he served under Ulysses S. Grant. Sherman led...
