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0938
given by employers; they were simply told their services were no longer required. At Woodstock, Shenandoah County a paper was in circulation after the election, among the white people pledging themselves not to employ colored laborers thereafter. Mr Schaeffer, a man of influence and wealth circulated the paper, and it is feard it will have a serious effect if white labor can be procured in the Spring.  With low wages and large families, many working men, even with good health, find it impossible to feed and clothe their children, and as a consequence many are in a suffering condition for warm clothing and blankets which no efforts of theirs can provide.

At a maximum of $10- per month, for which they labor for unprincipled men, who too frequently defraud them, well knowing that the colored man cannot afford to take legal steps for the recovery of his honest dues; the freedmen are kept in a condition of pauperism - 

The law governing Contracts does not work advantageously to the colored people for the reason that as they cannot read themselves, they have to suffer the most gross impositions in agreements drawn up by employers and read and explained by him for his own interest anothe deception of the freedman, who frequently discovers the fraud only when he comes to the Bureau to compel the exactin of the agreement as he understood it.
 
It is also a matter of much regret, that the better class of the community as well as the Civil Authorities wink at, or are totally blind to the looseness of