A Union Officer in the Reconstruction - Tapa blanda

Beginning in 1866, John William De Forest served fifteen months as an agent of the Freedmen's Bureau in Greenville, South Carolina. After leaving the army, he wrote a series of magazine articles giving a full and realistic account of the bureau's operation as it intersected with the daily lives of freedmen. In 1948 the articles were compiled in A Union Officer in the Reconstruction, reprinted here for the first time. A companion volume to De Forest's Civil War memoir, A Volunteer's Adventures, it offers a deft analysis of the structure of postwar southern society and gives a firsthand description of the impact of emancipation, defeat, military rule, and social and economic disorganization.