• Local KnowledgeBlack Texans, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and Military Occupation in Reconstruction Texas
• Edward Valentin Jr. (bio)

In September 1867, an overwhelmed and exhausted Freedmen’s Bureau agent named Charles E. Culver requested permission from the bureau’s assistant state commissioner in Texas to arm freedpeople in Freestone County. From June 1867 until his murder in November of that year, Culver and eleven US soldiers administered a bureau district in Central Texas that consisted of three counties and encompassed an area of over twenty-eight hundred square miles. In a letter to his superior, Culver expressed great confidence in the relationship he had cultivated with freedpeople in his district over the preceding months: “The Negroes will stand by me in any thing but I don’t know how far you would back me in using them as a means of offense and defence.”¹ While Culver understood that his request to arm black civilians to help strengthen federal authority was controversial, his willingness to rely on armed African Americans illustrates the interdependent relationships that developed between freedpeople and federal authorities during Reconstruction.

Those relationships were built through information exchanges that are well documented in the official records of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Years after the initiation of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, the Freedmen’s Bureau records [End Page 29] still have much to tell us about the politics of freedpeople.² In Texas and other parts of the postwar South, freedpeople gathered local knowledge through their own information networks and shared that knowledge with federal officials. In so doing, black Southerners helped the US Army understand and navigate unfamiliar spaces during Reconstruction, assumed informal roles as intelligence agents within federal institutions, and helped extend the reach of federal authority in the South. In the months preceding Culver’s proposal to arm black civilians, for example, freedpeople supplied him with information on violence against African Americans, construction of schools, and other issues pertaining to the three counties he administered. At the same time, however, freedpeople and federal agents established these alliances with different aims, and in the end, neither group fully achieved its goals.

Well into the twentieth century, historians described bureau agents as opportunistic carpetbaggers who manipulated Reconstruction policies and black Southerners to achieve their own selfish ends. After the civil rights movement, scholars, expanding upon W. E. B. Du Bois’s earlier work, depicted Reconstruction as an “unfinished revolution” and portrayed bureau agents as well-intentioned individuals whose efforts were hindered by a federal government unwilling to commit the resources necessary to complete the South’s transformation. In 1981, James Smallwood exemplified this revisionist approach in an article on Culver himself that concluded that while the Culver accomplished “little in his district,” his failure resulted from an absence of resources rather than lack of commitment to his duties: “He had tried.”³

Today, Smallwood’s assessment faces challenges from two groups of historians. One of these focuses more on Reconstruction’s unfulfilled promises and the varying degrees of unfreedom that persisted into the postbellum era. As part of the move toward what Elliott West has called the “Greater Reconstruction,” this [End Page 30] scholarship incorporates events in the postwar South into the longer history of US government wars against Native peoples and views the motives and actions of the federal government with greater skepticism than historians of Smallwood’s generation did.⁴ This historiography highlights a lack of federal commitment to African American equality.

The second group argues that agents of the federal government achieved a greater degree of success than previously recognized. Despite limited resources and ideological challenges, federal occupiers were determined to protect freedpeople from white insurgents. In this view, men like Culver not only tried, as Smallwood argued, but achieved intermittent successes in protecting the rights of freedpeople, who understood that the federal government was an ally in an ongoing war.⁵

This article is a local study that focuses on freedpeople’s actions on the ground at specific moments. Smallwood called for “reanalysis of the local agents,” because of the importance of regional specificity in the discourse surrounding Reconstruction’s successes and failures, and Christopher Bean has recently echoed that call in...

• 德克萨斯州地方知识黑人德州人，解放者局和重建中的军事占领
• 小爱德华·瓦伦丁（生物）

1867年9月，一个名叫查尔斯·E·卡尔弗（Charles E. Culver）的疲惫不堪的弗里德曼局特工，请求得克萨斯州副州长助理的许可，在弗里斯通县武装自由人。从1867年6月直到他那年11月被谋杀，卡尔弗和11名美国士兵在德克萨斯州中部管理一个由三个县组成的局区，面积超过280平方英里。在给上级的一封信中，卡尔弗对他在过去几个月中与当地自由人建立的关系表达了​​极大的信心：“黑人在任何事情上都会支持我，但我不知道你会支持我多远用它们作为进攻和防御的手段。” ^1个 虽然卡尔弗了解到他要求武装黑人平民以帮助加强联邦权力的说法是有争议的，但他依靠武装非裔美国人的意愿说明了重建期间自由人与联邦当局之间相互依存的关系。

这些关系是通过信息交流建立的，这些信息交流在弗里德曼局的正式记录中有据可查。在“自由人和南方社会计划”启动后的几年，自由人局的记录[第29页]仍然有很多内容可以告诉我们关于自由人的政治。^2个在得克萨斯州和战后南部的其他地区，自由人通过自己的信息网络收集当地知识，并与联邦官员分享这些知识。这样一来，黑人南方人帮助美国陆军在重建期间了解并驾驭了陌生的空间，在联邦机构中担任情报人员的非正式角色，并帮助扩大了南部联邦政府的权限。例如，在卡尔弗提议武装黑人平民之前的几个月中，自由人向他提供了有关针对非裔美国人的暴力行为，学校建设以及与他所管理的三个县有关的其他问题的信息。但是，与此同时，自由人和联邦特工建立了具有不同目标的这些联盟，最终，这两个组织都没有完全实现其目标。

进入20世纪，历史学家将各局特工描述为机会主义者，他们操纵重建政策，而黑人南方人则实现了自私的目的。在民权运动之后，学者们以杜波依斯（WE Bo Du Bois）的早期工作为扩展，将重建描绘为一场“未完成的革命”，并将各局特工描绘成善意的个人，他们的努力受到联邦政府的阻挠，他们不愿花费必要的资源来完成重建工作。南方的转型。1981年，詹姆斯·斯莫特伍德（James Smallwood）在有关卡尔弗本人的一篇文章中举例说明了这种修正主义的方法，该结论得出结论，尽管卡尔弗完成了“在他所在地区的小事”，但他的失败是由于缺乏资源而不是对职责的承诺： 。” ³

今天，Smallwood的评估面临着两组历史学家的挑战。其中之一更侧重于重建未兑现的诺言以及战后时代持续存在的不同程度的自由。作为向Elliott West所谓的“大重建”迈进的一部分，这项[End Page 30]奖学金将战后南方的事件纳入了美国政府针对土著人民的长期战争历史中，并观察了联邦政府的动机和行动政府比Smallwood一代的历史学家更加怀疑。⁴此史学说明，联邦政府对非裔美国人平等的承诺缺乏。

第二组认为，联邦政府的特工取得了比先前公认的更大的成功。尽管资源有限且在意识形态上面临挑战，但联邦占领者仍决心保护解放者免受白人叛乱分子的侵害。按照这种观点，像卡尔弗这样的人不仅像斯莫尔伍德所说的那样尝试过，而且在保护自由人的权利方面取得了间歇性的成功，他们理解联邦政府是正在进行的战争的盟友。⁵

本文是一项本地研究，着重于特定时刻在地面上的自由人的行动。Smallwood呼吁“对当地特工进行重新分析”，因为在围绕重建成功与失败的论述中，区域特殊性的重要性，而Christopher Bean最近也回覆了这一呼吁。