Reacting to Virginia’s secession, western Virginians created a new state, the only one the Civil War fostered. The bitter conflict and governmental realignment aroused issues of loyalty, survival, and freedom and inflicted civil and military turmoil into the lives of all white and African American residents.
At war’s end, the Lincoln Administration established the Freedmen’s Bureau to alleviate the formerly enslaved peoples’ plight. Bureau agents faced geographical challenges, white opposition, and a serious refugee problem at Harpers Ferry. They installed Northern teachers in Jefferson and Berkeley counties before working statewide to build schools in Black communities.
With fresh research and analysis, this book presents the original—sometimes chilling—Bureau agents' dispatches to revisit a tumultuous time in American history.
Reacting to Virginia’s secession, western Virginians created a new state, the only one the Civil War fostered. The bitter conflict and governmental realignment aroused issues of loyalty, survival, and freedom and inflicted civil and military turmoil into the lives of all white and African American residents.
At war’s end, the Lincoln Administration established the Freedmen’s Bureau to alleviate the formerly enslaved peoples’ plight. Bureau agents faced geographical challenges, white opposition, and a serious refugee problem at Harpers Ferry. They installed Northern teachers in Jefferson and Berkeley counties before working statewide to build schools in Black communities.
With fresh research and analysis, this book presents the original—sometimes chilling—Bureau agents' dispatches to revisit a tumultuous time in American history.
Reacting to Virginia’s secession, western Virginians created a new state, the only one the Civil War fostered. The bitter conflict and governmental realignment aroused issues of loyalty, survival, and freedom and inflicted civil and military turmoil into the lives of all white and African American residents.
At war’s end, the Lincoln Administration established the Freedmen’s Bureau to alleviate the formerly enslaved peoples’ plight. Bureau agents faced geographical challenges, white opposition, and a serious refugee problem at Harpers Ferry. They installed Northern teachers in Jefferson and Berkeley counties before working statewide to build schools in Black communities.
With fresh research and analysis, this book presents the original—sometimes chilling—Bureau agents' dispatches to revisit a tumultuous time in American history.
