Some asked for geographic and population data. The surveys are most revealing as records of how these agents of the federal government conceived of the question of freedom-what they called, “one of the gravest social problems ever presented a government.” What kinds of questions did they ask? The forms had forty-two questions.
In spite of these conditions, the camps were also sites where Black people profoundly restructured the South by their very movement and relationships. In 1863, the Inquiry Commission heard that 3,000 freedmen had fortified the fort in Nashville for fifteen months without pay. Many of the camps were overseen by the Union, while others were established and run by freedpeople themselves. Abigail Cooper estimates that by 1865 there were around 600,000 freedpeople in 250 refugee camps. Historians are still working to understand the scale of refugees’ movements during the Civil War. The three appointed commissioners-Samuel Gridley Howe, James McKaye, and Robert Dale Owen-were charged with investigating the condition and capacity of freedpeople. Authorized by the Secretary of War in March 1863, the Inquiry Commission was called in part as a response to the ever-increasing number of refugees-who were still referred to at the time as “contraband”-appearing at Union camps. Two years before the Bureau was established, however, there was the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission. The question of how formerly enslaved people would be regarded by and assimilated into the state as subjects was most obviously worked out through the Freedmen’s Bureau, which was meant to support newly freed people across the South. Notices from enslavers seeking self-emancipated Black people were common in newspapers throughout the Americas, as seen in this 1854 copy of the Baltimore Sun. The Emancipation Proclamation, in 1863, and the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, abolished slavery in the secessionist Confederate states and the United States, respectively, but it is important to remember that enslaved people were liberating themselves through all manners of fugitivity for as long as slavery has existed in the Americas.
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