Stephen Atkins Swails
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Stephen Atkins Swails was a soldier in the Union Army during the American Civil War. Although originally enlisting as a private, he was the first African-American soldier promoted to commissioned rank
1st LT. Stephen Swails, 1864
The Kingstree Star newspaper threatened Swails' life in print ("South Carolina Proscription" The Telegraph-Courier, July 31, 1879)
Freedmen's Bureau
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The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, usually referred to as simply the Freedmen's Bureau, was a U.S. government agency of early post American Civil War Reconstruction, assisting free
Stephen Atkins Swails
…lieutenant on 28 April 1865 and discharged on 20 August 1865, when the regiment mustered out at Boston. After the war, Swails worked as an agent for the Freedmen's Bureau, practiced law in the South, and became active in the political life of South Carolina. He married Susan Aspinall, a mixed-race Charlestonian, who bore…
A Bureau agent stands between a group of Whites and a group of freedmen.
The Freedmen's Bureau office in Memphis, Tennessee, 1866
Marriage certificate issued by the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, Wilson County, Tennessee, 1866
The Misses Cooke's school room, Freedmen's Bureau, Richmond, Virginia, 1866