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G16

Head Quarters, District of the Nottoway,
Petersburg, Va.,  Jany. 5th, 1866.

General:

The care and subsistence of the families of the Freedmen in the south is likely to prove not only an expensive but a very troublesome matter:  Under existing orders citizens of this state who have scarcely bread to put in their mouths are in some cases to be required to house and feed large families of blacks whom orders and humanity both prohibit them from turning out of doors.

The recent order of Col. Brown upon the subject does not seem to me to cover the case or to reach the point desired by all the proper protection of the weak and helpless negroes.  You may very properly punish whites who inhumanely turn destitute women and children out of house and home in the middle of winter, but there can be neither justice nor propriety in punishing whites for not giving to their former slaves what in many cases they have not for