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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.

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…

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…

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 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."

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…

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…

Throughout the Civil War thousands of enslaved men, women, and children attained their freedom by seeking refuge with United States troops as they moved across Virginia. They were declared "contraband of war" in May 1861 and Freedmen's Villages grew…

A joint Congressional committee was appointed in 1865 to determine whether the former Confederate states were entitled to have representation in Congress. More than one hundred witnesses testified early in 1866 about the situations in the four…

For several months after the end of the war, the army stationed soldiers, including African Americans, throughout Virginia to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation and protect the freedpeople. White Lunenburg County residents petitioned Governor…