Mar 21, 2024 - Sale 2663

Sale 2663 - Lot 366

Price Realized: $ 2,250
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 800 - $ 1,200
(RECONSTRUCTION.) Orlando Brown. Freedmen's Bureau circular strongly encouraging freedmen to enter sharecropper contracts. Letterpress circular, 8 x 5 inches, signed in type by Colonel Orlando Brown as Assistant Commissioner for Virginia of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, & Abandoned Lands; one vertical fold, otherwise minimal wear. Richmond, VA, 19 September 1865
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"The freedmen, in some parts of the State, refuse to enter into just and reasonable contracts for labor, on account of they believe that the United States Government will distribute lands among them. . . . No lands will be given them by the Government." The bureau's agents are instructed to "explain to them the advantages of at once entering into contracts for labor for the coming year, and that the system of contracts is in no way connected with slavery, but is the system adopted by free laborers everywhere. It is believed that the renting of small tracts of land by the farmer to his laborers would be mutually beneficial."
None traced in OCLC or at auction, although the text appeared in several publications from 1866 to 1906.