Freedmen's Bureau Site — New Orleans

Between 1865 and 1872, federal offices in Tremé registered freedmen as citizens, issued labor contracts, and documented marriages. The agents also worked to reunite families separated by sale. They established schools. When disputes arose between former slaveholders and former slaves, agents adjudicated them. The Bureau managed this transition for nearly 350,000 people across Louisiana. The records they compiled are now searchable through the National Archives. They are one of the most important genealogical resources for African American families in the South. The Bureau operated until Reconstruction's political support collapsed in 1872. A historical marker stands in Tremé. New Orleans was captured early in the Civil War and occupied by the Union Army, sparing it the destruction that many other Southern cities endured. That occupation made it possible for federal agencies to begin work here while the war was still being fought elsewhere. The city that had housed the largest slave market in the country — where two-thirds of more than a million enslaved people were forcibly relocated to the Deep South — became the place where the apparatus of freedom was assembled, office by office, contract by contract, name by name.