What's good, Joe? You're listening to Co Switch. I'm Jean Demby.

This is one of the great sliding doors moments in U.S. history.

So in late 1864, William T. Sherman, who was a union general, had been leading his troops throughout the South, trying to break the spirit of the Confederacy.

He was burning down cities like Atlanta and Savannah in Georgia. He destroyed rail lines and

factories and along the way he was freeing the enslaved people in those places

some of whom who were no longer tied to their plantations or land,

joined Sherman's troops in a kind of caravan of the liberated.

But Sherman saves special ire for South Carolina because South Carolina

was the slave state that was the first to leave the union, the cradle of

treason. The state where pro-slavery forces fired the first cannon salvo on federal troops,

shots that would become the first in the bloody civil war to follow.

So when Sherman finally got to South Carolina, he drew up his special field orders number 15,

a plan that called for taking hundreds of thousands of acres of land in South Carolina

along the ocean, land that had been seized from slave owners who were

lowered to the Confederacy, and turned that land, all of it, over to formerly

enslaved black people. It would be about 40 acres for each of the black families there.

That was one of the first real attempts at reparations for black folks, and famously,

former slave owners would eventually be compensated by the American government for the loss of their property, that is, the human beings they owned.

Sherman's plan, though, never went into effect.

But the promise of that plan, the so-called 40 acres in a mule,

it's going on to become a rallying cry, a shorthand, and calls for reparations for black folks to this day.

But what if it turned out that some of that promise, a really, really small part of it,

...