Keep track of personnel of Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, with emphasis on Veteran Reserve Corps membership.
| License: | Apache Software License 2.0 |
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The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands (1865 - 1872), commonly known as the Freedmen's Bureau, was established at the close of the American Civil War with the purpose of helping the newly emancipated become integrated into free society by establishing and inspecting schools, promoting fair and honest labor practices, ensuring that proper justice was done in the civil courts, and supplying clothing and rations to the needy, among other things. I first became interested in the Freedmen's Bureau some years ago when reading the personal correspondence of its Commissioner, General Oliver Otis Howard, during the period of the war and after. By the fall of 2018 I had gathered an embarrassing amount of mostly unstructured data on individual Bureau employees, and being a Django developer, I found that the most convenient way of making some sense of what I had collected.
This application has a heavy focus on the military service of Freedmen's Bureau employees, since the majority of them were Civil War veterans, often still in active service. Many of the officers employed were members of the Veteran Reserve Corps, made up of soldiers who were unfit for active field service due to wounds or disease contracted in the line of duty. The Bureau also depended heavily on officers of the Regular Army and of the United States Colored Troops.
To create a normal user account, just go to Sign Up and fill out the form. Once you submit it, you'll see a "Verify Your E-mail Address" page. Go to your console to see a simulated email verification message. Copy the link into your browser. Now the user's email should be verified and ready to go.
To create an superuser account, use this command:
$ python manage.py createsuperuser
For convenience, you can keep your normal user logged in on Chrome and your superuser logged in on Firefox (or similar), so that you can see how the site behaves for both kinds of users.
The following details how to deploy this application.
See detailed cookiecutter-django Docker documentation.
Freedmen's Bureau image: Waud, Alfred R. , Artist. The Freedmen's Bureau / Drawn by A.R. Waud. Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/92514996/>.
- Freedmen's Bureau Records, held and microfilmed by The National Archives: https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/freedmens-bureau, images accessed from FamilySearch: https://www.familysearch.org/search/collection/list/?cqs=freedmen
- Oliver Otis Howard Papers, George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives, Bowdoin College Library, Brunswick, Maine: https://library.bowdoin.edu/arch/mss/oohg.shtml
- Military service records from Fold3: https://www.fold3.com/
- Personal details from Find A Grave: https://www.findagrave.com/ and Ancestry: https://www.ancestry.com/
- Field record of officers of the Veteran Reserve Corps, from the commencement to the close of the rebellion. Scriver & Swing, [1865?], Washington, D.C., U.S. National Library of Medicine Digital Collections: http://resource.nlm.nih.gov/101177853.
- Veteran Reserve Corps officer lists from Pennsylvania in the Civil War: https://pa-roots.com/pacw/veteranreservecorps.html#officers
- Soldier profiles from Antietam on the Web: https://antietam.aotw.org/
- Heitman, Francis Bernard, 1838-1926. Historical Register And Dictionary of the United States Army: From Its Organization, September 29, 1789, to March 2, 1903. Washington: Gov't. Print. Off., 1903.: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000334097
- United States. Adjutant-General's Office. Official Army Register for .... Washington: [s.n.], 1916.: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100113492
- United States. Civil service commission. [from old catalog], and United States. Bureau of the census. [from old catalog]. Official Register of the United States ... Washington: U.S. Govt. print. off., 1816.: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009557655
- Bean, Christopher B. Too Great a Burden to Bear: The Struggle and Failure of the Freedmen's Bureau in Texas. Fordham University Press, 2016.
- Cimbala, Paul A. "On the Front Line of Freedom: Freedmen's Bureau Officers and Agents in Reconstruction Georgia, 1865-1868." The Georgia Historical Quarterly, vol. 76, no. 3, 1992, pp. 577–611. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40582592.
- Cimbala, Paul. Under the Guardianship of the Nation: The Freedmen's Bureau and the Reconstruction of Georgia, 1865-1870. University of Georgia Press, 2003.
- Finley, Randy. From Slavery to Uncertain Freedom: The Freedman’s Bureau in Arkansas 1865-1869. The University of Arkansas Press, 1996.
- Richter, William. Overreached on All Sides: The Freedmen's Bureau Administrators in Texas, 1865-1868. Texas A&M University Press, 1991.