As Reparations Debate Rages, Question Arises: How Much Would ‘40 Acres and a Mule’ Cost in 2023?

With California considering reparations payments and the Census Bureau reportedly considering asking Black Americans whether they are the descendants of slaves, a question arises: How much would the original reparations promise of “40 acres and a mule” be worth today?A team of economists and policy specialists on Wednesday presented the California reparations task force with an estimate of how much reparations would cost the state, and the number left many with sticker shock: $800 billion.The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that officials at the Office of Management and Budget are considering asking whether Black Americans are the descendants of slaves on the next Census. Doing so would provide more granular data for tracking demographics and help differentiate these Americans from recent immigrants in official figures. It would also be useful information for a future exploration of reparations.Since 2020, the topic of reparations payments to the descendants of slaves has taken on renewed prominence in American political discourse, with California and several municipalities around the country exploring the possibility.The story of reparations, though, began in earnest in January 1865, when General Sherman met with 20 Black leaders in the South, who told him that land ownership would be the best way to secure the future of newly emancipated slaves after the Civil War.The meeting was the origin of the famous promise from Sherman to the Black Americans — that the United States would provide each household with 40 acres of land to cultivate. The mule came later.General Sherman’s order promised that “each family shall have a plot of not more than 40 acres of tillable ground” and that “the military authorities will afford them protection, until such time as they can protect themselves.”The land that Sherman initially promised was about 400,000 acres in coastal Georgia and South Carolina, which was to be redistributed to about 40,000 former slaves.Months later, in March 1865, Congress laid out plans for land reform in the South by authorizing the Freedmen’s Bureau to take land from plantation owners and redistribute it to former slaves and to white southerners who remained loyal to the Union.President Johnson, though, nixed the plans, ordering the vast majority of land to be returned to its former owners, including most of the land freedmen had already settled, effectively ending America’s radical promise of reparations.While America never fulfilled Sherman’s promise, the new discussions concerning reparations raise the question of how much this promised land would have been worth back in 1865, and what it would cost to fulfill this promise in 2023.According to a 1906 article by a professor of history at West Virginia University, Walter Fleming, the land that was sold along the coast of Georgia and South Carolina was “worth forty to sixty dollars in 1860” but “was sold for a dollar and a quarter per acre.”The 1860 census reported that there were nearly 4.5 million Black Americans in the country then, and 2.2 million Black men. With each being promised 40 acres of land, there would be a total of around 88 million acres of land redistributed.At $40 per acre, 88 million acres would cost $3.52 billion in 1865 dollars. This would amount to about $64.97 billion in 2023 dollars, using an average rate of inflation of 1.86 percent since the 1860s.A more accurate calculation, however, would tally the pricetag using the price of gold.In 1865 the dollar was worth 23.22 grains of gold. With 437.5 grains of gold in an ounce and an ounce of gold being worth $1,980.07 today, each 1865 dollar would be equal to $105.09 dollars today.Using the gold conversion, each 40-acre plot, with an acre worth roughly $40 in 1865, would be worth $168,144 in 2023. This would put the cost of fulfilling Sherman’s promise for the 2.2 million freedmen in post-war America at about $370 billion in today’s currency.To theoretically do the same in 2023 for each of America’s 15.16 million Black households, the price tag would be $2.5 trillion.Because the land after the Civil War would have been confiscated and not paid for, this calculation might not be the most useful for estimating the cost of fulfilling Sherman’s promise in 2023. Instead, the price tag could be calculated by using the price of farmland today.In 2021, the average price of an acre of farmland in South Carolina, one of the areas where Sherman promised to resettle freedmen, was $3,150, according to the Department of Agriculture.Using this price point, the cost of fulfilling Sherman’s promise — to give each of 2.2 million freedmen 40 acres of South Carolina farmland or a cash equivalent — would cost in the ballpark of $277 billion in 2023.The price of giving each of the 15.17 million Black American households — the number of such households reported by the 2020 Census — the cash equivalent of 40 acres of South Carolina farm land in 2023 would be $1.91 trillion.While these estimates are not scientific, they do serve to give a sense for the massive scale of the reparations initially planned for Black Americans during reconstruction.Yet what about California?In that state, the average price of an acre of farmland in 2021 was $15,410. According to the 2020 Census, there are 806,733 Black households in California.The price tag for giving each Black California household 40 acres of land in 2023 would be $497 billion. This wouldn’t even include the mules.The California legislature, though, is not looking at fulfilling Sherman’s promise per se, as the Civil War ended 150 years ago. California’s first-in-the-nation reparations task force is also exploring compensation for other forms of discrimination.“All forms of discrimination should be considered in reparations,” a professor of public policy at the University of Connecticut, Thomas Craemer, told the task force at a hearing Wednesday.The $800 billion estimate would also include reparations for damages Black Californians suffered during the American war on drugs, say, but exclude other things like the devaluation of Black-owned homes through discriminatory housing policies.Ultimately, whether California goes forward with reparations and the scale of the project will depend not on the task force but on the legislature. As it stands, it’s not clear how much the state legislature is willing to spend.

As Reparations Debate Rages, Question Arises: How Much Would ‘40 Acres and a Mule’ Cost in 2023?

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