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Zones of Occupation, Zones of Access: Digital History and the Spatial World of Emancipation

In 1867, a freedman named Peter Price walked fifteen miles to a Freedmen’s Bureau office in Piedmont, North Carolina, with hopes that the local agent could help him acquire his share of the crop at the plantation where he worked. By itself, Price’s walk suggests the well-known transformations the war had made, both in the status of former slaves and in the direct provision of services by a new federal state. Like many people, before and since, Price arrived at the government office with a complaint. The person he complained to, the face of the national state in this section of North Carolina, was someone who seemed well placed to aid him, a man of serious commitment and courage. By 1867, Freedmen’s Bureau agent and detached Army officer Hugo Hillebrandt was on his third revolution, having fought for Kossuth in his native Hungary, for Garibaldi in Italy, and for the U.S. in the Civil War. Hillebrandt immediately wrote an order, demanding the landlord divide the crop. Hillebrandt, a veteran of the Hungarian 1848 uprising and national unification wars in Italy, had been wounded during the war. Then he enrolled in the Veterans’ Reserve Corps and was assigned to the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau. Repeatedly he expressed his eagerness to intervene against murderous planters; repeatedly he found himself unable to do so (“Peter Price”). To his frustration and Price’s, Hillebrandt’s order turned out to be not worth the paper it was printed on. Price’s landlord threw the order on the ground and stomped on it, telling the freedman that the landlord would see “Hilly Brand further in Hell than a Jay Bird could fly before we should have Vol. 58, nos. 1 & 2 (Fall 2020/Winter 2021) 27