 Complete the following phrase:  At the beginning of Reconstruction, Georgia had over 460,000 freedmen. In January 1865, in Savannah, William T. Sherman issued Special Field Orders, No. 15, authorizing federal authorities to confiscate abandoned plantation lands in the Sea Islands, whose owners had fled with the advance of his army, and redistribute them to former slaves. Redistributing 400,000 acres 1,600 km2 in coastal Georgia and South Carolina to 40,000 freed slaves in forty-acre plots, this order was intended to provide for the thousands of escaped slaves who had been following his army during his 