40 Acres and a Lie tells the history of an often-misunderstood government program that gave formerly enslaved people land titles, only to take the land back. Read more revelatory stories here and listen to Reveal’s groundbreaking audio investigation here . This project is a collaboration between the Center for Public Integrity and the Center for Investigative Reporting.
Four days after Easter Sunday, a group of about 10 Confederate spies bedded down for the night at a South Carolina cotton plantation. For days the spies, who had grown up along these waterfronts, had tracked the Union’s naval movements along the rivers and beaches of the South Carolina Sea Islands. But now, as they slept on the night April 9, 1863, an enslaved man tipped off the enemy.
The spies were captured by Union forces by the following morning. “A Negro, James Hutchinson, betrayed us,” Townsend Mikell, one of the spies, recalled in his memoir. “Jim Hutchinson must have felt he had struck a mighty blow against the slaveholding plantation aristocracy, and procured his own freedom at the same time,” Edisto Island historian Charles Spencer would later write.
Hutchinson, the runaway slave, was Mikell’s half-brother. Their father, Isaac Jenkins Mikell, was among the most prominent plantation owners in the area. He lost hundreds of acres of land as the Confederacy fell and Union Gen.
William T. Sherman issued the battlefield directive known as Special Field Orders, No. 15, which granted plots of t.