Special Field Orders, No. 15 were military orders issued during the American Civil War, on January 16, 1865, by General William Tecumseh Sherman, commander of the Military Division of the Mississippi of the United States Army. They provided for the confiscation of 400,000 acres (1,600 km²) of land along the Atlantic coast of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida and the dividing of it into parcels, on which were to be settled approximately 18,000 freed slave families and other Blacks then living in the area.