Historical Contract: Freedman's Contract Between Isham G. Bailey and Freedmen Cooper Hughs and Charles Roberts

Forty Acres and a Mule

Historical Contract: Freedman's Contract Between Isham G. Bailey and Freedmen Cooper Hughs and Charles Roberts

01/01/1867

Historical Contract

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History provides a historical contract between White landowner Isham G. Bailey and Black Freedmen Cooper Hughs and Charles Roberts in Marshall County, Mississippi, dated January 1, 1867. The contract stipulates that both Roberts and Hughs were to raise cotton and corn and give more than half of the cotton and two-thirds of the corn they raised to Bailey, but the Roberts family was to receive 487 pounds of meat compared to the 550 pounds given to the Hughs family. Additionally, Roberts and his wife agreed to do housework for an additional $50 a year, while the Hughs family agreed to tend the livestock for no additional compensation. This contract was signed in the years following the unfulfilled promise of "Forty Acres and a Mule," which was part of Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15 that was issued on January 16, 1865, to allot land and leftover Army mules to formerly enslaved African American families. 

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The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

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