A great variety of business is brought before the Bureau. Here is a negro-man who has printed a reward offering fifty dollars for information to assist him in finding his wife and children, sold away from him in times of slavery: a small sum for such an object, you may say, but it is all he has, and he has come to the Bureau for assistance. Here is a free mulattress, who was stolen by a guerilla during the war, and sold into slavery in Arkansas, and she has come to enter a claim for wages earned during two years of enforced servitude. Yonder is a white woman, who has been warned by the police that she must not live with her husband because he is black, and who has come to claim protection in her marriage relation, bringing proof that she is in reality a colored woman. That poor old crippled negro was maimed for life when a slave by a cruel master, who will now be compelled to pension him. Yonder comes an old farmer with a stout colored boy, to get the Bureau’s sanction to a contract they wish to make. “Pull off your hat, Bob,” says the old man; “you was raised to that;” for he was formerly the lad’s owner. He claims to have been a Union man. “I was opposed to secession till I was swep’ plumb away.” He is very grateful for what the officers do for him, and especially for the good advice they give the boy. “I’ll do well by him, and larn him to read, if he’ll do well by me.”
As they go out, in comes a powerful, short-limbed black, in tattered overcoat, with a red handkerchief on his head, and with a lordly countenance, looking like a barbarian chief. He has made a crop; found everything—mules, feed, implements; hired his own help,—fifteen men and women; managed everything; by agreement he was to have one half; but, owing to an attempt to swindle him, he has had the cotton attached; and now it is not on his own account he has come, but he is owing his men wages, and they want something for Christmas, which he thinks reasonable, and he desires the Bureau’s assistance to raise three hundred dollars on the said cotton. “For I’m bound,” he says, “to be liberal with my men.”
Here is a boy, who was formerly a slave, to whom his father, a free man, willed a sum of money, which the boy’s owner borrowed, giving his note for it, but never repaid,—for did not the boy and all that he had belong to his master? The worn and soiled bit of paper is produced; and now the owner will have that money to restore, with interest. Lucky for the boy that he kept that torn and dirty scrap carefully hidden all these years! Such documents are now serving to right many an ancient wrong. I saw at the Freedmen’s Bureau at Richmond a large package of wills, made in favor of slaves, usually by their white fathers, all which had been suppressed by the legitimate heirs. One, a mere rotten and jaundiced rag, scarcely legible, had been carried sewed in the lining of a slave-woman’s dress for more than forty years,—the date of the will being 1823. Her son was legally emancipated by that instrument; but her owner, who claimed to be his owner by inheritance, threatened to kill her if the will was not destroyed, and he believed that it had been destroyed. That boy was now a middle-aged man, having passed the flower of his years in bondage; and his mother was an old woman, living to thank God that her son was free at last. The master, a rich man, had as yet no idea of the existence of that will, by which he was to be held responsible for the payment of over forty years’ wages to his unlawful bondman.
From another of these documents, made by a white master, I copied the following suggestive paragraph: “It is also my last will and desire that my beloved wife Sally Dandridge, and my son Harrison, and my daughters Charity and Julia, should be free; and it is my wish and desire for them to be emancipated hereafter, and for them to remain as free people.” Another paragraph gave them property. This will, like nearly all the rest, had been registered and proved; and, like them, it had been suppressed,—the beloved wife and son and daughters remaining in bondage, until the slave system went down with the Rebellion, and a day of judgment came with the Freedmen’s Bureau.
[15]. At Vicksburg, Miss., in one school of 89 children, only three were of unmixed African blood. In another, there were two black and 68 mixed. In a school for adults, there were 41 black to 50 mixed. In a school of children on a Mississippi plantation, there were 46 black and 23 mixed. In another plantation school, there were 30 black and 7 mixed. These figures illustrate not only the rapid bleaching of the race, but also the difference in color between town and country.
[16]. See Paragraph VII. in Circular No. 5, issued by Major-General Howard, Commissioner of the Bureau, and approved by the President, June 2d, 1865:—
“In all places where there is an interruption of civil law, or in which local courts, by reason of old codes, in violation of the freedom guaranteed by the Proclamation of the President and the laws of Congress, disregard the negro’s right to justice before the laws, in not allowing him to give testimony, the control of all subjects relating to refugees and freedmen being committed to this Bureau, the Assistant-Commissioners will adjudicate, either themselves or through officers of their appointment, all difficulties arising between negroes themselves, or between negroes and whites or Indians, except those in military service, so far as recognizable by military authority, and not taken cognizance of by the other tribunals, civil or military, of the United States.”