Documents from Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867

Editorial Method and Copyright

Because of the inherent limitations of HTML and variations among web browsers, the sample documents will not appear exactly as they do in the volumes of Freedom. (For example, paragraphs are not indented.)

Each document includes a citation to the original in the National Archives, as well as to the transcription published in Freedom.

Material from Freedom and other publications of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project is under copyright. It may be used without permission for teaching, research, and other noncommercial purposes. It may not be used for profit without permission from the publisher.

Sample Documents

• Maryland Fugitive Slave to His Wife, January 12, 1862
  For John Boston, the triumph of his own escape to freedom within Union lines was tainted by the resulting separation from his wife.
  [image of manuscript (62K)]
• Proclamation by the President, May 19, 1862
  After General David Hunter issued an order declaring free all the slaves in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, President Lincoln quickly overruled him and used the occasion to press his own plan for gradual emancipation with compensation to owners.
• Commander of the 5th Division of the Army of the Tennessee to a Tennessee Slaveholder, August 24, 1862
  Writing to a former West Point classmate, General William T. Sherman offered a disquisition on why he would not return fugitive slaves to their owners.
• Louisiana Planters to the Commander of the Department of the Gulf, January 14, 1863
  Writing to Union General Nathaniel P. Banks, sugar planters lamented the effect of slave flight and Union military occupation on plantation operations.
• Testimony by the Superintendent of Contrabands at Fortress Monroe, Virginia, before the American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission, May 9, 1863
  Captain Charles B. Wilder explained how fugitive slaves, once having escaped to Union lines, liberated fellow slaves and spread the word of freedom deep in Confederate territory.
• Testimony by a South Carolina Freedman before the American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission, June 1863
  Testifying before a War Department commission that was investigating the condition and prospects of ex-slaves, Harry McMillan discussed his people's lives in bondage and their aspirations in freedom.
• Commander of the District of Northeastern Louisiana to the Headquarters of the Department of the Tennessee, June 12, 1863
  A Union general described to his superiors the bloody battle of Milliken's Bend, Louisiana, the first test of combat for a brigade of newly enlisted black soldiers.
• Mother of a Northern Black Soldier to the President, July 31, 1863
  Shortly after the battle of Fort Wagner, S.C., a free-black woman whose son was in the 54th Massachusetts Infantry advised President Abraham Lincoln of his responsibility to prevent the Confederates from enslaving captured black soldiers.
  [image of manuscript (75K)]
• Massachusetts Black Corporal to the President, September 28, 1863
  On behalf of the men of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, Corporal James Henry Gooding protested the injustice of the Union's paying its black soldiers—in this case, Northern free men rather than Southern ex-slaves—less than their white comrades.
• North Carolina Freedmen to the Commander of the Department of Virginia and North Carolina, November 20, 1863
  Black men who had been forcibly impressed to perform military labor for the Union army addressed an indignant petition to General Benjamin F. Butler.
  [image of manuscript (69K)]
• Marriage Certificate of a Black Soldier and His Wife, December 3, 1863 [image (125K)]
  The marriage of two former slaves, Private Rufus Wright and Elisabeth Turner, was presided over by a black army chaplain, the Reverend Henry M. Turner.
• Plantation Regulations by a U.S. Treasury Agent, February 1864 [image (86K)]
  A broadside announced the rules governing the employment of black laborers on plantations in Union-occupied Louisiana.
• Maryland Slave to the President, August 25, 1864
  Maryland's exclusion from the Emancipation Proclamation left Annie Davis still a slave. Insistent on her right to freedom, she demanded that President Abraham Lincoln himself clarify her status.
  [image of manuscript (44K)]
• Missouri Black Soldier to His Enslaved Daughters, and to the Owner of One of His Daughters, September 3, 1864
  Private Spotswood Rice promised his daughters—and warned the woman who owned one of them—that their liberation was at hand.
• Keeper of Sandy Point Lighthouse to a Baltimore Judge, November 6, 1864
  Shortly after a new state constitution abolished slavery in Maryland, a unionist observer described the efforts of local citizens to nullify the former slaves' freedom.
• Black Residents of Nashville to the Union Convention, January 9, 1865
  In a petition to a convention of white unionists that was considering reorganization of the state government and the abolition of slavery, black Tennesseans argued that black men were fit to exercise the privileges of citizenship.
• Meeting between Black Religious Leaders and Union Military Authorities, January 12, 1865
  A Northern newspaper reported the proceedings of a remarkable gathering: At Savannah, Georgia, twenty black ministers and lay leaders joined Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton and General William T. Sherman to consider the future of the thousands of slaves freed by the march of Sherman's army.
• Order by the Commander of the Military Division of the Mississippi, January 15, 1865
  Intending chiefly to disencumber his mobile army of the fugitive slaves who followed in its train, General William T. Sherman reserved a swath of land along the south Atlantic coast for settlement exclusively by former slaves, promising the settlers "possessory title" to small tracts.
• North Carolina Black Soldiers to the Freedmen's Bureau Commissioner, May or June 1865
  At the end of the war, black soldiers stationed near Petersburg, Virginia, wrote to the commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau to protest the suffering of their wives, children, and parents at a settlement on Roanoke Island, North Carolina.

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Last revised 20 November 2007