Angela Walton-Raji & Toni Carrier, Mapping the Freedmen's Bureau (2024)

This interactive map, created by Angela Walton-Raji and Toni Carrier, depicts the sites of Freedmen’s Bureau field offices and contraband camps across the United States during Reconstruction. The Freedmen’s Bureau was established by an act of Congress in March 1865 to supervise and manage all matters pertaining to refugees, freedmen, and lands abandoned or seized during the Civil War. Its mission was to help formerly enslaved individuals become self-sufficient and to provide relief to those impacted by the war. Duties carried out from the field offices shown on the map included issuing rations and clothing, operating hospitals and refugee camps, supervising labor contracts between planters and freedpeople, managing apprenticeship disputes and complaints, assisting benevolent societies in the establishment of schools, helping to legalize marriages entered into during slavery, and providing transportation to refugees and freedpeople who were attempting to reunite with their family or relocate to other parts of the country. The map also highlights contraband camps, which were camps behind Union lines during the war where enslaved individuals fled to escape slavery. Those who escaped were labeled "contraband," a term implying they were enemy property confiscated from the Confederacy. These camps were often hastily constructed wherever the Union army was stationed and they became centers for recruiting African American troops and workers for the Union. Living conditions in the camps varied depending on who ran them. In some, formerly enslaved individuals were treated very poorly; in others, they experienced a degree of freedom, and schools were even established.