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In 1863, Elias M. Greene, chief quartermaster of the military department of Washington, D.C., established a community for some of the many freedpeople who escaped slavery during the Civil War. This broadside printed the regulations for the government…

Major General Oliver O. Howard took command of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands in May 1865 and appointed commissioners for "the insurrectionary states." He ordered them to "introduce practical systems of compensated labor" and to…

The freedmen of Petersburg chose a man named David May to represent them to the Freedmen's Bureau "to adjudicate in all claims, or cases of difficulty arising between Whites and Freedmen, or between Negroes themselves."

The Freedmen's Bureau also had responsibility for administering land (plantations) that white Southerners abandoned, although in Virginia that did not often happen. Nevertheless, many freedpeople believed that the property of their former owners…

The first page of an alphabetized list of male freed men in New Kent County recording who had formerly owned them and how much tax they owed. Under Virginia law, males older than sixteen paid an annual poll tax. At that time, payment of a poll tax…

In this detail of his lithograph celebrating the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, James Carter Beard illustrated the ability of African Americans families to live together without facing the threat of separation as had been the case under…

In this detail of his lithograph celebrating the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, James Carter Beard illustrated the ability of African Americans ability to marry legally, a right they had been forbidden under slavery.

For decades after the Civil War African Americans searched for family members who had been separated by the domestic slave trade. In 1865 Stephen Flemming, who had been sold from Bowling Green, Virginia, to Louisiana about 1849, wrote Governor…

For decades after the Civil War African Americans searched for family members who had been separated by the domestic slave trade. In 1882, Jennie Brown, of Corinth, Mississippi, wrote to the sheriff of Mecklenburg County, Virginia, to ask about…

Virginia's General Assembly passed legislation in 1866 to legalize the "Marriages of Colored Persons now cohabiting as Husband and Wife." Freedmen's Bureau agents were authorized to compile registers of cohabiting couples who considered themselves…