Alexa Va, Aug. 18/65
Jim Mackafee states that he was a slave at Macon, Miss., where he has property that he accumulated from the proceeds of his “patch” and where he has a wife and parents; and that his master Bob Phillips run him off to the vicinity of Lynchburg in this state from which he was shifted from place to place that he escaped and got within our lines at Dansville where he went to work for U.S. Govt. and also at City Point, and came from there to this place to get work but found none– wants. to get back to his family but is without means.
Statement of Jim Mackafee, 18 Aug. 1865, Miscellaneous Records, series 3878, Alexandria VA Superintendent, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, & Abandoned Lands, Record Group 105, National Archives. Filed with court cases. The statement was given at the office of the Freedmen's Bureau superintendent at Alexandria and, according to a notation on the reverse, was referred the same day to General O. O. Howard, the bureau's commissioner. No response has been found in the letters-sent or endorsements volumes of Howard's office.
Published in Land and Labor, 1865, pp. 633–34.