(MILITARY--CIVIL WAR.) TIBBS, ALEXANDER. Papers of a Corporal in the 64th United States Colored Infantry, chronicling his enrollment, promotion from private to corporal (2 documents), discharge, and applications for pension, and his subsequent peacetime "truck-farm," lease agreement to grow cotton with Klapp & Shaw, a large commercial plantation. A total of seven partially printed documents accomplished by hand. The last one with considerable manuscript notations. Vp, 1863-1890
A fascinating group of documents chronicling a black soldier's Civil War and peacetime experience. Alexander Tibbs joined the Union army on December 18th, 1863. He was discharged on March 13th 1866. The 64th Colored Infantry was organized from the 7th Louisiana Infantry (African Descent). It functioned for the most part in garrison duty and was mustered out in Mississippi. There seems to be a nine year gap in Corporal Tibbs life that we have no record of. In 1877, he signed a complex agreement with Klapp & Shaw, the terms of which put him into virtual slavery as a sharecropper. Emancipation and Reconstruction with no real protection for the tens of thousands of homeless or near homeless freedmen, provided the perfect opportunity for large farms like Klapp & Shaw to exploit the needy. Tibbs was able to get a pension of twelve dollars a month from the government in 1891. This was raised twice more, the last time in 1925, for seventy-two dollars a month. The latter was signed by Winfield Scott, commissioner of pensions.
