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Freedmen and freedwomen suffered emotionally and materially after emancipation, even while many of the circumstances related to enslavement that had triggered their suffering as slaves ended. Like southern whites, they had lived in a war zone and suffered from the exigencies of civil war: deprivation, starvation, and dislocation. New obstacles, too, emerged as the formerly enslaved experienced freedom: they lacked shelter, food, medical care, and stable employment. The path to freedom was strewn with new obstacles: uncertainty, negotiating new terms of employment, redefining marital roles and relationships, racial violence and abuse. Many freed African Americans struggled emotionally and psychologically under the new conditions of emancipation and entered insane asylums or became suicidal. Despite increasing numbers of black patients in asylums and a purported ‘rise in insanity’ among blacks, southern whites continued to believe the region’s black population was impervious to melancholy because they were an inferior, content, uncivilized race whose simple needs were met. Instead, insane blacks were deemed ‘manic,’ a condition resulting from ex-slaves receiving freedom and responsibilities they were ill-equipped to handle. A racialized construction of suffering and mental illness emerged after the war; melancholy and suicide were reserved for whites, madness and mania for southern blacks.

Congress established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands—more commonly known as the Freedmen's Bureau—in March 1865. Upon its creation, the short-lived and unprecedented federal agency assumed the Herculean task of overseeing the transition from slavery to freedom in the immediate post-emancipation South. It became the embodiment of the triumphant North in a defeated South, and its agents the very face of federal authority. This bureau profoundly affected the lives of African-American women in the age of emancipation. Aside from applying the northern economic theory of free labor in a southern context, the bureau also worked to institute a social reconstruction based on northern middle-class notions of domesticity, dependency, and family relations. Whatever the intentions and actions of bureau officials stationed across the South, freedwomen—much like freedmen—encountered, trusted, and challenged the bureau and used it to their own ends. The bureau accomplished a great deal before being officially dismantled in 1872.

The realization of policy of the Freedmen's Bureau rested foremost on its officials at the local level. Using the gospel of free labor as the platform, bureau officials and agents across the South sought to convey to freedpeople not only the great rewards of free labor but also what they understood to be the rights, obligations, and values of freedom. Beyond applying the economic theory of free labor in a southern context, then, the bureau sought to initiate a social reconstruction that would transform southern slave society based on northern ideas of domesticity. Whether attempting to regulate federal relief, southern labor relations, apprenticeship laws and practices, or the administration of justice, the bureau endeavored to use the binary northern ideologies of free labor and domesticity to return former slaves to the workforce, to place freedmen at the head of black households, and to “teach” freedwomen to be the virtuous women, dutiful wives, and devoted mothers of true womanhood.

In the immediate post-emancipation South, the Freedmen's Bureau limited its federal relief activities to temporarily aiding former slaves and loyal white refugees with rations of food, clothing, fuel, and medical care. In doing so, it operated in the short term and worked to avert an immediate need rather than what some reformers recognized already as a long-term crisis of extraordinary times. Official relief policy charged bureau men in the field with instructing freedmen and women in the importance of free labor, self-reliance, and independence and distributing material relief only to “prevent starvation or extreme want”. However, the appeals of freedwomen for federal relief often represented some of the most troubling cases for bureau men at the ground level of Reconstruction. Indeed, many, if not most, of the requests for bureau aid came from women who faced “a weight of circumstances”.

With varying degrees of success, African-American women encountered, trusted, challenged, and used the Freedmen's Bureau in their efforts to shape the outcome of emancipation. These interactions did not come without consequence. With defiant words and actions, the freedwomen who complained to federal authorities, in the words of a local bureau official in Virginia in 1866, committed that “unpardonable sin”. Although to this agent, their complaints only served to “widen the breach between whites and blacks”, to the women who made them, they were part of what would become a lengthy battle to define and defend freedom, womanhood, and a newfound citizenship for African Americans on their own terms. Indeed, the very act of making a complaint—whatever the complaint—to the Freedmen's Bureau was a courageous political act in the age of emancipation. The interaction between the Freedmen's Bureau and freedwomen reveals the many ways in which both northern gender ideology and freedwomen themselves acted to shape the political culture of Reconstruction.

The advisers William F. Mott, Samuel Willets, Christopher R. Roberts, and Daniel W. James met, at a special meeting in January, to request compensation from the city for the property destruction during the Draft Riots. Good news came to the managers in May 1868. The nuisance of making do at Carmansville ended with the opening of their new home in Harlem, next to Hamilton Grange, the home of Alexander Hamilton. The African American community faithfully supported the Colored Orphan Asylum from its inception through the end of the Civil War. Perhaps the managers resented the support some in the black community had shown toward the Home for the Children of Freedwomen, later known as the Brooklyn Howard Colored Orphan Asylum, established in 1866 with financial assistance from the Freedmen's Bureau.

This chapter looks at sacerdotes (priestesses), particularly those associated with the public cults of Mars, Fortuna Muliebris, Bona Dea, Liber, Magna Mater, and Ceres. It also discusses the female support personnel. Without these women, many of whom were libertae (freedwomen) and servae publicae (public slaves), the ritual system would have ground to a halt. As a group, these priestesses and cultic assistants further complicate traditional accounts of Roman “priesthood” and confirm that women were involved in official religious service at nearly every level. Of all the priestesses under consideration in this chapter, the enigmatic saliae virgins (Salian Virgins) may be the most intriguing. The chapter analyzes how these priestesses dressed, where they sacrificed, and with whom they were associated in the ritual sphere.

This chapter addresses some of the ways in which women like Gabriella conceived freedom: what they understood by it and how they sought to weave it into their lives in the rapidly changing port cities of Rio de Janeiro and Havana. Freedwomen were like freedmen in that they sought wealth and property ownership as a means to put distance between themselves and slavery and to advance socially. In other words, property was a way of giving meaning to freedom. Depictions of ex-slave women's future roles swung from seeing them as domesticated mothers in male-headed, “moral” families, to negating their maternal roles altogether and seeing them as laborers in other people's domestic settings. Freedwomen's property accumulation presented a lived alternative to such visions—one that combined motherhood and work, and that also combined partnership with men and earning an income on their own account.

Former slaves in Kentucky had little ability to assert their hard-won liberty in the first months and years after emancipation, as self-proclaimed “Negro Regulators” imposed a reign of terror. In particular, families—sometimes with male heads of household, sometimes not—faced significant hurdles as they sought to establish autonomous lives. Many masters in the “unionist” state proved reluctant to release their slaves, openly and violently defying federal policy regarding emancipation. Freedpeople expressed massive frustration with the Commonwealth's disruptive, racially biased, and abuse-ridden apprenticeship system. Free black women working in white households and urban settings complained of the often-vicious treatment they received at the hands of employers and other white Kentuckians. Taken altogether, these attempts to limit emancipation, powerfully reinforced by organized violence, constitute a concerted effort to maintain black subordination, thereby denying former slaves the free and potentially equal status they desired, expected, and demanded.