I’m not sure how to answer this. I wouldn’t want to take anything away from your daughter’s project by doing her research for her. But the subject is complicated and I think I can say a few things that might help with her research.

The issues around the passage of the 14th Amendment, as they appeared to women’s rights activists, are well covered, with transcripts of Congressional debates, and details of the petitions and organizing activities of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and others, in the History of Woman Suffrage, Volume 2, Chapter 17, pages 90-151, which your daughter can read at the link. In addition, if your public library, or a nearby academic library, has online access to the ProQuest historical newspapers collection, she might find it useful to take a look at The New York Times reporting on the announcement of—and speeches given at—the 11th National Woman’s Rights Convention, held in New York City, as detailed in the articles, “Woman’s Rights. The Eleventh National Woman’s Rights Convention” (April 2, 1866) and “The May Anniversaries” (May 11, 1866).

In order to supplement these sources and to more fully understand the Congressional debates over the language of the 14th Amendment, I think it is important to note that the essential purpose of the amendment was not to define the principle on which the right of suffrage was based, but rather to craft a means by which the country could be “reconstructed,” which is to say that the joint House and Senate “Committee of Fifteen” (which included Representative John A. Bingham of Ohio) that put together the language of the amendment and brought it to the Congress as a whole for a vote was recommending a way for the southern states that had seceded to be re-admitted to the Union, a very urgent issue at the time.

When they were re-admitted, these states’ representatives would have to be seated in Congress. But there was a problem with doing that: According to the Constitution, the number of slaves in the southern states had figured into the counting of the states’ population for the purpose of deciding the number of Congressional representatives from those states (the “three-fifths clause”). But with the end of the war and the passage of the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery, there were no longer any slaves to count.

If, then, the sheer number of persons living in the southern states were now to be used to determine the number of representatives these states could send to Congress, these states would gain a very considerable advantage over what they had before the war because the ex-slaves would then be counted as “full” persons, even though, in these states, they were not allowed to vote. The result would be an actual increase in the legislative power of these states, whose strengthened congressional delegations would still be drawn from the same class of white landowners whose “retrograde” views had played a decisive role in the events leading to the war. This would have been plainly unacceptable, as it would have seemed that the South had actually been rewarded as a result of the war.

To solve this problem, the Committee of Fifteen created a condition for these states re-admittance to the Union, which is described in section 2 of the constitutional amendment it proposed:

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

In other words, the committee was saying, “Okay, maybe we can’t force you southern states to give Blacks the vote, but if you don’t, we’ll just deduct the Black population from your total population when counting how many congressional representatives you get, so you don’t get any advantage over us; in fact, you’ll be disadvantaged, because now you won’t be able to count your Black population at all whereas before you could count three-fifths of it (more or less) in figuring out how many congressional representatives you could have.” This seemed like a fair, if somewhat convoluted, compromise to the committee. The committee thought it would stand a good chance of being passed.

In fact, essentially the same sort of scheme had already passed Congress as part of a civil rights law, but Congressman Bingham, who was both a lawyer and a judge, was convinced that that law would be found by the courts to be unconstitutional for a number of reasons (including the fact that it infringed on the rights of states to determine which of its citizens could vote), so he had actually opposed its passage in Congress and argued that it needed to be passed as a constitutional amendment instead. That is why it was deliberated on by the Committee of Fifteen—actually called the Committee on Reconstruction—of which he was an influential member, and was proposed by it. It was part of the committee’s plan for how the southern states could be brought back into the fold: If these states’ legislatures reaffirmed their allegiance to the United States and voted to accept the conditions in the proposed amendment, then they would be re-admitted.

I cannot find a source that gives Bingham himself the responsibility for inserting the word “male” in the language of the amendment. Perhaps you have found such a source. The material in the History of Woman Suffrage appear to me to suggest otherwise, that it was simply the result of the committee’s long hours in trying to craft precise language that would do no more than what the committee intended the amendment to do, without inadvertently opening the door to a storm of objections surrounding the much larger principles of suffrage, whether it was a universal “human right” or not, that would most probably have derailed the amendment’s chance of passage.

I have not found a map of it either, but that may be partly because the field order itself was ambiguous about the area as well as about what exactly it authorized.

General William Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15 from his temporary headquarters in Savannah on January 16, 1865. It defined an area along the coast north and south of where he had encamped his army: “The islands from Charleston south, the abandoned rice fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea and the country bordering the St. John River, Florida.” A broad interpretation of this would take it to include a continuous 30-mile-wide swath of land extending along the coast south from Charleston, South Carolina, as far as Jacksonville, Florida, and including all the Sea Islands. I have cropped a section of an 1854 map from Wells’ McNally’s System of Geography and tinted this area light red.

This is the region of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida that is known as the “low country.” You can show your students why it is called that by looking at the satellite version of the Google map for the region, which shows that it is a deep shade of green.

It is flat and almost entirely just above sea level. It was an area where large rice plantations flourished. Growing rice was an extremely labor intensive occupation and the plantation owners owned many slaves. The slave population of the area therefore far exceeded the white population, which, of course, constituted the landholders.

From the North’s point of view, it was not only the epicenter of the most egregious form of the unjust slave system, wherein a large number of black slaves labored entirely for the profit of white slave owners, but it was also (not coincidentally) the epicenter of the secession movement that precipitated the beginning of the war at Fort Sumter.

The purpose of Sherman’s order was to set aside a large area within which freed blacks could be settled. The area came to be popularly known as the “Sherman Reservation.”

Sherman had defined a general area, but his wording was somewhat ambiguous. He clearly set aside all the Sea Islands, but within the coastal swath of land, he appears to have been aiming to confiscate—and make available for settlement—only the plantations along the rivers and other “abandoned” lands. Nevertheless, Congress had earlier decided that all land and property of men who were fighting for the Confederacy (or even the property of others who had supported or conducted business with Confederate forces or authorities) had been technically “abandoned,” even if their families were still on the land, making it eligible for confiscation by the Federal government. This would have vastly expanded the land reckoned to be available for settling freed blacks, even if Sherman’s order was originally interpreted to apply only to the islands and the land along the rivers (rather than the entire 30-mile-wide swath of land).

Sherman wrote a letter to President Andrew Johnson on February 2, 1866, explaining the origin of his field order. It was published in The New York Times the following day and was undoubtedly meant for public consumption:

The Hon. E. M. Stanton, Secretary of War, came to Savannah soon after its occupation by the forces under my command, and conferred freely with me as to the best methods to provide for the vast number of negroes who had followed the army from the interior of Georgia, as also for those who had already congregated on the islands near Hilton Head, and were still coming into our lines. We agreed perfectly that the young and able-bodied men should be enlisted as soldiers, or employed by the Quartermaster in the necessary work of unloading ships, and for other army purposes. But this left on our hands the old and feeble, the women and children, who had necessarily to be fed by the United States. Mr. Stanton summoned a large number of the old negroes mostly preachers with whom he had long conference, of which he took down notes. After the conference he was satisfied the negroes could, with some little aid from the United States, by means of the abandoned plantations on the Sea Islands and along the navigable waters take care of themselves. He requested me to draw up a plan that would be uniform and practicable. I made the rough draft and we went over it very carefully. Mr. Stanton making many changes, and the present Orders No. 15 resulted and were made public.

I know of course we could not convey title to land and merely provided “possessory” titles to be good so long as war and military power lasted. I merely aimed to make provision for the negroes who were absolutely dependent on us, leaving the value of their possessions to be determined by after events or legislation.

At that time, January, 1865, it will be remembered that the tone of the people of the South was very defiant, and no one could foretell when the period of war would cease. Therefore I did not contemplate that event as being so near at hand.

President Johnson was about to begin pardoning ex-Confederates and restoring the property the Federal government had confiscated from them, provided that they took an oath of allegiance to the U.S. The whites who had original title to land in “Sherman’s Reservation” petitioned the President to recognize their titles and give them back full possession. Sherman’s letter emphasized that he had had no authority to give full title to the land covered in his field order, but only a temporary or “possessory” title to it, under his wartime military authority, and he implied that he would not have issued the order if he had known that the war was about to end.

Sherman’s explanation provided justification for Johnson’s order to the Freedmen’s Bureau, which had been liberally setting up black settlements in the area, with each family receiving “forty acres and a (leased army) mule.” Much to the dismay of the Freedmen’s Bureau, of the military officer General Rufus Saxton who Sherman had put in place to implement his order—and of course to the African Americans who had been resettled into the area—Johnson ordered the restoration of the land to the original owners.

Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s Secretary of War, had traveled to Savannah to meet with Sherman at the time the General had issued his order, and appears to have approved it orally, but not formally, in the sense that he did nothing to countermand it. Stanton’s biographer, Frank Abial Flower, wrote, of the order:

Stanton, on reading it, said to Sherman: “It seems to me, General, that this is contrary to law.” Sherman’s response was: “There is no law here except mine, Mr. Secretary.” Stanton smiled and the order was issued a day or two after he left for the North. General Saxton says Stanton was opposed to the order, but acquiesced in its promulgation in deference to the positive wishes of General Sherman.

On the face of it, Stanton's implied reluctance seems unlikely, because, as Sherman explained, the plan had suggested itself to Stanton and Sherman after they met in Savannah with a group of African American clergy who had asked for relief from the government for the many thousands of ex-slaves who were then in the area, either because they had originally resided there or because they had followed Sherman’s army across the South.

When the notion of establishing them on abandoned or confiscated lands came up for discussion, almost all of these clergy urged that military forces be used to settle them in areas in which all whites would be prohibited from entering, as a way to protect the settlements from white encroachments. Militarily, this could be most efficiently accomplished by designating the Sea Islands and the low lands along the rivers as the places to settle.

Some of the most radical members of Congress were delighted by this. Indeed, several had expressed their desire as the war ended to hang everyone who had been in the Confederate armies, to confiscate all their property, including their land, and to redistribute it all permanently to ex-slaves, recreating the South as a kind of African American preserve from which Southern whites would be barred—a plan that today would be called “ethnic cleansing.”

After the war ended, the contentious results of Sherman’s field order arose as the Federal government sorted out how it would deal permanently with what Sherman had instituted primarily as a military expedient—to free his forces from the burden of caring for refugees as he moved his armies north into the Carolinas. Historian Jacqueline Jones, in Saving Savannah, summed up Sherman’s original goal:

Ultimately, then, Special Field Order No. 15 grew out of the refugee problem, which, in the words of one Union officer, “left on our hands the old and feeble, the women and children,” too many hungry mouths to feed in the city of Savannah. … The order made explicit the connection between military service for men and homesteads for their families, and it provided not for fee-simple titles, outright ownership of the land, but rather possessory titles that remained contingent on future political developments. The order itself remained “subject to the approval of the President.” What came to be called the Sherman Reservation, then, was a means of draining Savannah of women, children, and the elderly while providing for enforced service among young men. This initial goal foreshadowed the order’s troubled future.

Down to our own time, the confused and conflicted intentions and authorities that informed the issuance of Field Order No. 15 and its later implementation and revocation, have been the focus of the claim of precedent for government reparations to ex-slaves and then to their descendants.