To commemorate Black Historical past Month, a particular featured doc show on Freedmen’s Bureau Marriage Information can be within the East Rotunda Gallery of the Nationwide Archives Constructing in Washington, DC, from February 4–March 3, 2025.
Because the Civil Conflict neared its finish, Congress established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Deserted Lands contained in the Conflict Division. Popularly generally known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, it offered help to previously enslaved individuals within the southern states and the District of Columbia to assist them transition from slavery to freedom.
The Bureau equipped requirements similar to meals and clothes, operated hospitals and momentary camps, and witnessed labor contracts between freedmen and plantation house owners or different employers. It additionally helped freedpeople set up faculties, buy land, find members of the family, and preside over and doc marriages between freed {couples}.
Unions between enslaved {couples} weren’t legally sanctioned or protected, and {couples} may very well be—and have been—separated. After the thirteenth Modification abolished slavery in 1865, states handed legal guidelines recognizing marriages of enslaved {couples}. With the assistance of Military chaplains and civil clergy, the Freedmen’s Bureau led the drive to legitimize these unions, issuing tens of hundreds of marriage certificates throughout its seven 12 months existence.
A sampling of those marriage certificates are presently on exhibit within the Nationwide Archives Constructing. One certificates on show is for Alfred Wiggins and Antoinette Marvigne from Napoleonville, Assumption Parish, Louisiana, who have been among the many first to be documented by the Freedmen’s Bureau. Their certificates is dated March 6, 1865, simply three days after the Bureau was established by an act of Congress.
Funding limitations and deeply held racist attitudes compelled the Freedmen’s Bureau to shut in 1872.
The primary Freedmen’s Bureau information got here to the Nationwide Archives in 1939, and through the years, historians, social scientists, and genealogists have used these more and more fragile information to doc the Black expertise in America. Within the early twenty first century the Nationwide Archives undertook a significant venture to protect and enhance the provision of those sources.
Immediately these information are a wealthy supply of documentation of the social and financial experiences of previously enslaved and not too long ago freed Black People in addition to the federal authorities’s insurance policies towards them following the Civil Conflict.
Go to the Nationwide Archives web site to be taught extra concerning the information of the Freedmen’s Bureau.
A particular because of Nationwide Archives curator, Alice Kamps, for offering info for this submit.
