South Carolina Freedwoman to an Unidentified Military Officer

[Orangeburg District, S.C.]  November 18th 1866

Dear General.  Sur please do me a peace of kineness if you please Sur. that is for you to see that I shall get my part of the crop that I have laboured for in the year of our freedom that is the yeare of 1865 When peace was Declared.  I worked for Mr Middelton Dantzler on the two Chop Road near providence church   he and the union troops that came there has promised to give us a Just part of the crop and has not Dun. So as yet   they promised to give us a part of the corn peas Rice and potatoes and my Close and So I havent got them as yet   he Sed to me that if I got my part I had to go to orange burgh to the yankes and So I dident go them and I taught I would get youre advice on the Subject   I am very nead[ey] for it So please General ancer thiss little note for me if you please by Ben   youres very Respec[tfl]

Levinah Malby

Levinah Malby to General, 18 Nov. 1866, enclosed in Bvt Lieut Col H W. Smith to Bt Brig Gen'l J. D. Greene, 21 Nov. 1866, Letters Received, series 3156, Columbia SC Acting Assistant Commissioner, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, & Abandoned Lands, Record Group 105, National Archives. The officer from whom Malby sought assistance was probably General Robert K. Scott, the Freedmen's Bureau assistant commissioner for South Carolina. In a covering letter of November 21, Scott's adjutant, acting under instructions from the assistant commissioner, transmitted Malby's letter to General J. Durell Greene, the bureau's acting assistant commissioner at Columbia, South Carolina, calling his attention to “the large number of complaints that are coming from Orangeburg District, especially the lower part of the District,” and directing him to “send an efficient officer, and a detachment of men to that district to enforce justice to the Freedpeople.” “The enclosed communication,” he wrote, “is a sample of the complaints, and demands prompt redress. If it becomes necessary to do so, establish a Bureau Court in Orangeburg District, . . . and have all such cases tried before it.”

Published in Land and Labor, 1865, p. 794.