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Major General Wager Swayne,
Assistant Commissioner of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands for the State of Alabama:
Sir,
As Commissioner appointed, under authority of an Act of the Legislature of Alabama, to aid you in the receipt and distribution of supplies to the destitute of the State, I deem it proper in view of the great destitution which exists throughout the State, and the repeated applications which we have been compelled to make for an increase in the estimate for supplies to meet the urgent and increasing wants of a suffering and starving people, (and to which the Government through the agency of your department has so generously responded,) to submit to you some facts touching the present condition of the people of the State, and the causes which have aided in producing this alarming state of destitution.

It is indeed difficult for those not familiar with the peculiar condition of affairs in the State, and the actual wants of our people, to conceive that such an