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![CLARA BARTON AND THE FREEDMEN'S BUREAU. 4 items: 1. BARTON, CLARA. Autograph Manuscript Signed ("Clara Barton"), 3 pp recto and verso, legal folio, [Washington, c.1866], a fair copy of a letter to the House and Senate requesting funds and services for Freedmen. image 1](/_next/image.jpg?url=https%3A%2F%2Fimg2.bonhams.com%2Fimage%3Fsrc%3DImages%2Flive%2F2020-11%2F10%2F25009662-1-2.jpg&w=2400&q=75)
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Lot 120
CLARA BARTON AND THE FREEDMEN'S BUREAU. 4 items:
1. BARTON, CLARA. Autograph Manuscript Signed ("Clara Barton"), 3 pp recto and verso, legal folio, [Washington, c.1866], a fair copy of a letter to the House and Senate requesting funds and services for Freedmen.
11 December 2020, 10:00 EST
New YorkSold for US$9,562.50 inc. premium
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CLARA BARTON AND THE FREEDMEN'S BUREAU.
4 items:
1. BARTON, CLARA. Autograph Manuscript Signed ("Clara Barton"), 3 pp recto and verso, legal folio, [Washington, c.1866], a fair copy of a letter to the House and Senate requesting funds and services for Freedmen.
2. ---. Autograph Manuscript Signed integrally ("Clara Barton"), a fair copy of Barton's hand of a Congressional resolution directing the Secretary of War to provide resources to Barton for her project, including buildings, wagons, clothes, barges, etc, 2 pp recto and verso, legal folio, bound with brads together with the previous document.
3. SHAW, EDWARD. Autograph Letter Signed to Clara Barton, as Speaker of the House of Representatives, 2 pp recto and verso, 4to, DC, February 21, 1867, asking her to be present for a Congressional vote on March 2, 1867, most likely referring to "An Act to provide for the more efficient Government of the Rebel States" (the Reconstruction act): "In other words, 'Sister, come home!'"
4. SCRIBNER, CHARLES AND JAMES W. GRIMES. ALS, 1 p, 8vo, n.d. [but c.1869], to President Ulysses S. Grant, recommending Clara Barton and her plan to appropriate Government Property for the benefit of the Freedmen community in DC. Grimes was U.S. Senator from Iowa serving on both the Committee on the District of Columbia and the Joint Committee on Reconstruction.
In addition to her work locating missing soldiers, Clara Barton also spent much of her time in the post-war years working to improve the life of the Freedmen in the DC area. She testified on February 21, 1866 before the joint Committee on Reconstruction (and item number 1 above is likely a fair copy of that testimony). In many ways, the plight of the Freedmen who fled Southern plantations in the wake of the war was the first great refugee crisis of Barton's career. Barton worked not just to address the immediate needs of food and housing, but also to strategize about more long term strategies for education and retraining to integrate former slaves into the new post-war economy. In the first document listed here, she writes, "The Contest against slavery gave freedom to 3,000,000 human beings whom we have clothed with the rights and privileges of citizenship. / The question may now fully be asked, have we also furnished them with the means of becoming useful citizens? The experience of the past few years warrants your Memorialist in asserting that we have been sadly deficient in this respect." She continues: "there is but one course left to pursue, and that, to teach those to whom we have given freedom, such industries and arts as will serve to make them self-sustaining ... the former relations of the Freedmen to labor and capital have been so completely changed that it is simply impossible for them to return en masse to their previous vocation, nor would it be wise for them to do so, as it would most assuredly make them subjects to their former masters, and not only subjects, but also their political instruments."
Barton closes by noting that educating Freedmen for skilled labor with have economic and political benefits, and, cleverly, she does not ask for new appropriations, only that "the remaining refuse of the war scattered around this city be applied to this purpose." The Congressional resolution present here is directed to the Secretary of War and asks him to make available to Clara Barton vacant hospital buildings and barracks as well as unused lumber, wagons, ordinance stores, clothing and medical supplies that are no longer needed by the military.
1. BARTON, CLARA. Autograph Manuscript Signed ("Clara Barton"), 3 pp recto and verso, legal folio, [Washington, c.1866], a fair copy of a letter to the House and Senate requesting funds and services for Freedmen.
2. ---. Autograph Manuscript Signed integrally ("Clara Barton"), a fair copy of Barton's hand of a Congressional resolution directing the Secretary of War to provide resources to Barton for her project, including buildings, wagons, clothes, barges, etc, 2 pp recto and verso, legal folio, bound with brads together with the previous document.
3. SHAW, EDWARD. Autograph Letter Signed to Clara Barton, as Speaker of the House of Representatives, 2 pp recto and verso, 4to, DC, February 21, 1867, asking her to be present for a Congressional vote on March 2, 1867, most likely referring to "An Act to provide for the more efficient Government of the Rebel States" (the Reconstruction act): "In other words, 'Sister, come home!'"
4. SCRIBNER, CHARLES AND JAMES W. GRIMES. ALS, 1 p, 8vo, n.d. [but c.1869], to President Ulysses S. Grant, recommending Clara Barton and her plan to appropriate Government Property for the benefit of the Freedmen community in DC. Grimes was U.S. Senator from Iowa serving on both the Committee on the District of Columbia and the Joint Committee on Reconstruction.
In addition to her work locating missing soldiers, Clara Barton also spent much of her time in the post-war years working to improve the life of the Freedmen in the DC area. She testified on February 21, 1866 before the joint Committee on Reconstruction (and item number 1 above is likely a fair copy of that testimony). In many ways, the plight of the Freedmen who fled Southern plantations in the wake of the war was the first great refugee crisis of Barton's career. Barton worked not just to address the immediate needs of food and housing, but also to strategize about more long term strategies for education and retraining to integrate former slaves into the new post-war economy. In the first document listed here, she writes, "The Contest against slavery gave freedom to 3,000,000 human beings whom we have clothed with the rights and privileges of citizenship. / The question may now fully be asked, have we also furnished them with the means of becoming useful citizens? The experience of the past few years warrants your Memorialist in asserting that we have been sadly deficient in this respect." She continues: "there is but one course left to pursue, and that, to teach those to whom we have given freedom, such industries and arts as will serve to make them self-sustaining ... the former relations of the Freedmen to labor and capital have been so completely changed that it is simply impossible for them to return en masse to their previous vocation, nor would it be wise for them to do so, as it would most assuredly make them subjects to their former masters, and not only subjects, but also their political instruments."
Barton closes by noting that educating Freedmen for skilled labor with have economic and political benefits, and, cleverly, she does not ask for new appropriations, only that "the remaining refuse of the war scattered around this city be applied to this purpose." The Congressional resolution present here is directed to the Secretary of War and asks him to make available to Clara Barton vacant hospital buildings and barracks as well as unused lumber, wagons, ordinance stores, clothing and medical supplies that are no longer needed by the military.