The barrels had been received by a teacher at a school for children of the wards. A total of four letters were hand-written and mailed by the functionaries' clerks over this proposed charge. The last letter said, in effect, skip the whole question _ the teacher already paid the freight.
Two dollars was quite a sum of money in 1867, when bacon was 13 to 15 cents a pound and a bushel of corn could be had for 80 to 95 cents. A doctor running a hospital for some of those government wards was paid the grand sum of about $97 a month _ and a teacher received considerably less! Yet, think of the waste of government money and manpower in this instance _ surely more than $2. I guess the teacher preferred to pay up and distribute the much-needed clothing than to wait for government action.
With such small affairs do I occupy my mind at times during what otherwise often is a boring task I have undertaken voluntarily. I'm helping index all the names in all the documents of the "Bureau of Freedmen, Refugees and Abandoned Lands" _ commonly known as the Freedmen's Bureau. This is an administration created by the federal government after the U.S. Civil War to care for and educate tens of thousands of freed and typically destitute slaves. The database resulting from this indexing _ and the images of the records _ will be available online free for African-Americans seeking their family histories and for other researchers through the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
I got into this effort through an interest in genealogy. I specifically joined the Freedmen's Bureau work in the thought that I might thereby see some of the stories of former slaves now freed. Not so, and such small damas as the freight charge are rare _ and usually one doesn't learn the outcome in any event, seeing only a portion of the recounting.
The handwriting and thus the names often are difficult to decipher. That's especially true in the signatures of the various officials. The handwriting of the clerks generally is better and clearer, though not necessarily so since it often involved the curliques of the "copper plate" style and sometimes the thick strokes similar to old German. Additionally, often the ink had faded so that photo-images of the records are dim. One factor making it easier is that the many of same names show up repeatedly.
But almost a greater obstacle is the stultifying nature of most of the documents themselves. Time after time they dealt solely with the exchange of bureaucratic reports _ requisitions for stationary, vouchers for payrolls and similar accounts, disputes over allowed expenses and other payments _ all penned in the formal style of "I have the honor to respectfully request" or to state or to transmit, and signed "very respectfully, your obedient servant, ..."
Yet read them one must to determine whether they bear some reference to a name within the body of the document, as well as in the person addressed and the signature. It's said that an army runs on paper. The Freedmen's Bureau, being under the War Department and largely staffed administratively by military officers, was no exception.
And, speaking of bureaucracy, Lt. Wm. F. Fernald, one of the sub district officials, wrote to his superior asking whether a U.S. flag might be issued or purchased, inasmuch as "numerous citizens of the Union persuasion have frequently expressed the desire ... to have one." The query was passed on to the next highest official, and then to another, and finally to the chief quartermaster for the military district. The answer came down 12 days later that "a flag may be transferred to the [Freedmen's] Bureau upon receipt of the proper order, but it cannot be sold to Citizens." Whether Lt. Fernald ever was issued a flag wasn't said.
Scattered among such mundane matters were more poignant references _ requests for 50 coffins, including varied sizes so as to bury children, or for lumber and metal bottoms to build coffins; pleas for clothing, especially for women and children, and for shoes and jackets and blankets _ and for lime and straw for the hospitals. The lime was for sanitation uses and whitewash, the straw for bedding. Despite orders that requests for clothing and other necessities were to be met immedately, there often was a lag of up to two months before the requests were filled.
Churches and other charity groups often contributed clothing. Clothes for the men often were made of Osnaburg cloth, which is a close-woven cloth somewhat like canvas but softer, lighter _ and cheaper. Women wore lindsey _ a coarsely woven cloth of wool and cotton or linen; wool for a better cloth typically was in scant supply.
One example: "I have the honor in compliance with request from your office to state since my last Med & Hosp. supplies came, I am well provided with hospital bedding & clothing with the exception of clothing for women and female children. I have no gown or underclothing for them. They come here most of them with scarcely enough on them to cover their nakedness and frequently so covered with vermin that it is necessary to burn all of their habilments at once."
Periodically came reports of "deceased and discharged men and deserters."
There also were requests for thousands of "rations" _ often in the form of barrels of salted pork. And yes, it was such situations as these where the needy were aided at government expense that gave rise to today's references to congressional "pork barrel" projects and feeding at the public trough.
Rarily, however, were any of the various reports themselves among the documents; rather, most documents were merely the cover letters.
Quite a few of the exchanges dealt with horses _ the need for them, the feeding of them, the transport of them, the use of them, where they were being situated, whether there was or wasn't authority for them _ and, at times, the rent of them. In one exchange, a officer was told he would not be reimbursed for the expense of having used a rented horse because paying $3 a day was excessive when typically one could rent a horse for a day for a dollar-fifty.
One of the more wryly amusing set of documents began in January 1867 in Virginia. Two men were due $15 each for having served a civilian court set up by the Freedmen's Bureau for a time on grounds that the regular civilian courts weren't treating the "freedmen" justly. For months, letters went back and forth among six Freedmen's Bureau officials. Each document typically explained that the money was due, or said the party writing stood ready to pay the two men as soon as proper documents were submited, or that the proper documents HAD been submitted, but apparently to the wrong person at a given time. The matter finally was wholly resolved and the men paid _ in August.
Another set might have been in part a transcript from a defendant's rant before Judge Judy. Apparently someone had suggested that a teacher in one of the freedmen schools had profited by renting out a portion of the school's land and pocketing that revenue. The irate accused denied the whole, explaining that rather he had allowed some of the school repairmen to use a plot as a garden and, far from profiting, had supplied seed and implements.
The school was to have received a portion of the produce for its benefit, he explained. However, the gardener/repairmen's success at growing vegetables was so indifferent that the school never actualy received any of the produce, the teacher insisted. Meanwhile, he said, he himself had paid upwards of $100 out of his own meager pockets over a period of time to fund such repairs and maintenance as replacing windows and doors, repairing the roof and floor, etc. He would happily accept belated compensation _ though, he said huffily, he had no expecation of ever seeing even a dollar of that money
returned.
I once had a full-time job at which I earned $33 a week before taxes, of which I consistently saved $5, but even so, the prices and payments of the 1860s are surprising. A barrel of lime sold for $3.50, but whitewash brushes were $1.50 each. A hundred pounds of straw could be had for 50 to 75 cents. Paper ws costly _ a ream (about 500 sheets) sold at $4.50
and a ream of foolscap (think, roughly, legal-size sheets or larger) for $6.50. (However, within a few months, many of those prices had risen by 20 to 30 percent, though a few items cost less.) A gross of steel pens (that's 144) cost $1.60, a dozen pints of ink _ $6.50. A cord of wood, cut and delivered, was $5, or a bit more ($5.20) if bought one at a time but maaaybe a bit less if bought in bulk.
A building to be used as a school house might be rented for $10 a month. One document was a receipt for $10 received from sale of a bureau horse. Allowing as much as $100 for a building's renovation was rare.
This already is too long, but I still want to say that there are quite a variety of indexing projects under way under LDS supervision, and that any interested party may participate _not just Mormons, and without any church pressures. All the results ultimately will be available worldwide free online in the form of huge searchable databanks _ some are already there. One recent count indicated there are more than 115,000 volunteers like me. Over time, I've indexed about 52,000 names and associated data within several projects, more than half within the Freedmen's bureau porject. To put that in perspective: On one recent day, volunteers had indexed more than 168,000 names in roughly half of a day.
Additional links:
About the Freedmen's Bureau:
http://freedmensbureau.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedmen's_Bureau
http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu/HIUS403/freedmen/overview.html
http://afroamhistory.about.com/cs/reconstruction/a/freedmensbureau.htm
http://www.archives.gov/research/microfilm/m1913.pdf
http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu/freedmen1.html
About the LDS projects:
http://www.familysearchindexing.org/en/index.jsp
http://genealogy.about.com/b/2007/04/12/try-your-hand-at-familysearch-indexing.htm
http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2008/01/familysearch-in.html
"I am, General,
Very Respectfully,
Your Obedt Ser't.
W. Storer How Bt. Maj. Va ...
(late) Supt Six Distri...."
"...J J DeLamater, S....
Chf Med Off B ...
State Va"
earsz
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