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2 Those Pests That Remind Us Daily of our Degradation, 1866 he learned to think himself a man, And privileged, you know, To adopt a new and different plan,— To lay aside the hoe. —T. Thomas Fortune, “bartow black” on the last monday of January 1866, marianna residents found a newcomer in their small town. brevet Capt. Charles memorial hamilton, a twenty-five-year-old Union army officer recently arrived from Washington by way of Tallahassee, rode in on horseback. hamilton’s immediate impression of Jackson County was “not unpleasant” and he found the people “hospitable and intelligent.” he had not come, however, to make himself amiable to a white population that so recently had rebelled against the flag and government he had sworn to uphold and for which he had nearly laid down his life. hamilton had been ordered to take up residence in marianna and establish an office of the Freedmen’s bureau.1 The bureau of Refugees,Freedmen,and Abandoned lands,commonly referred to as the “Freedmen’s bureau” or “the bureau,” had been created by Congress the previous march as a division within the Department of War. its purpose was to oversee “all subjects” relating to the former slaves, including distributing “clothing, food, and fuel,” supervising labor relations , and operating schools. From his office in Washington, D.C., the bureau ’s commissioner supervised assistant commissioners assigned to each of the former Confederate states.These assistant commissioners, in turn, presided over a number of districts, each to be administered by a sub-assistant commissioner. The sub-assistant commissioners, responsible for multiple counties, each containing thousands of freedmen, were to be aided by locally recruited civilian agents. Gen.oliver otis howard,a maine native who gained fame as the “Christian General” while serving as a corps commander under Gen.William T. sherman, was named the bureau’s commissioner. howard recruited his assistant commissioners from his wartime staff. he appointed Col. Thomas W. 10 / Chapter 2 osborn, his friend and former chief of artillery, as assistant commissioner responsible for Florida.2 Florida was originally folded in with neighboring states and was established as a separate district only with osborn’s arrival in september 1865. The Florida division of the bureau was late setting up compared to other states and from its inception suffered from a lack of manpower and funds. initially, osborn relied on local army post commanders to assume the bureau’s duties. These officers, presumably distracted by their regular army duties, were no substitute for full-time bureau assistant subcommissioners . Unable to wait indefinitely for the army to detail officers to the bureau staff, osborn issued an order designating local probate judges, clerks of court, and justices of the peace as civilian agents of the bureau. osborn’s order effectively placed white Florida civilians, including many former Confederates, in charge of freedmen’s affairs. by the end of 1865, the army began to alleviate the bureau’s staffing crisis by assigning it officers from the veteran Reserve Corp. The v.R.C., originally known as the invalid Corps, consisted of wounded soldiers too disabled to return to their regular combat units but still able to serve the military in other capacities. The recruitment of v.R.C. officers was particularly appealing to the bureau because their salaries continued to be paid by the army.osborn requested that howard send him officers to supervise or replace the southern civilians he had appointed, and he soon received four v.R.C. officers whom he assigned to districts with headquarters in Jacksonville, Gainesville, lake City, and marianna. eventually, the bureau ’s Florida staff would expand to eighteen sub-assistant commissioners, consisting of eleven v.R.C. and seven regular army officers. osborn appointed hamilton sub-assistant commissioner of a district encompassing Jackson County and its sparsely populated neighboring counties, holmes, Calhoun, and Washington.3 hamilton was born on november 1,1840,near the small farming community of Jersey shore in north-central Pennsylvania, not far from Williamsport . he was raised amid the productive lands of the valleys between the West branch of the susquehanna River and the low, wooded mountains of the Alleghenies, where his family had settled in the eighteenth century. hamilton grew up hearing stories of West branch valley men, like his grandfather, who had declared their own independence from britain prior to the similar declaration at Philadelphia and fought a brutal campaign against the british-allied iroquois. hamilton attended a local academy where he learned the bible...

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