Whats a Government Mule?
I just did a little googling and found the answer… I was sitting in the geology laboratory at the university on Monday when the answer came to me. We were studying topographic maps which are divided by the federal land survey, which was conducted in the late 1800s, into quadrants known as ‘townships’ and ‘ranges.’ With me so far? Good. When you divide these squares in quarters, you have 40-acre plots. This is where it gets interesting: our teacher informed us that Arkansas once had a policy known as the ‘forty acres and a mule promise.’ Turns out the state offered black settlers forty acres and one mule at no cost shortly after the Civil War as a tenet of the Reconstruction policy. Basically, the government started giving people ‘government mules’ to aid in the plowing of the fertile Arkansas soil. Here’s the problem: recently-freed slaves would come to Arkansas and get their land and a government mule, but received no money for seed, housing or land development. In short, these poor
