American Historical Ephemera and Photography, Featuring African Americana

Party printed document, 1p, 8 3/4 x 14 in. (adhesive repair, creasing at folds, light soil). Signed by J.F. Richardson as Assistant Special Agent of the Treasury Department and by lessees "Waters & Klapp," and "Approved as being within Military Supervision" by Union Brigadier General John Wynn Davidson ("J.W. Davidson") at Head Quarters, District of Natchez, 26 February 1865. Document bordered by 29 internal U.S. tax stamps, each initialed and dated "W & K / Mch 8/65" in ink. Bottom left with embossed stamp of "United States Rental and Plantation Office / District of Natchez."

Lessees Waters & Klapp register their plantation in an agreement "concerning abandoned and confiscable lands and the employment and general welfare of Freedmen." The plantation "known as the Good Hope Plantation, situated in the Parish of Concordia in the State of La owned by L.R. Marshall leased by him to Waters & Klapp containing (1200) Twelve Hundred acres all under cultivation Said plantation is situated six miles from Vidalia La on Lake Concordia."

Government lessees George Gillson Klapp (1839-1916) of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and James D. Waters (1832-1892) jointly leased Good Hope plantation, as well as Hermitage plantation, from Levin R. Marshall (1800-1870) during 1865 and 1866. Marshall was a prominent Natchez banker and planter whose holdings included five plantations in Mississippi and Louisiana which spanned more than 14,000 acres and another 10,000 acres in Arkansas. The 1860 U.S. Federal Slave Schedule indicates that Marshall enslaved more than 200 men, women, and children in Louisiana alone. His Louisiana plantations, under Union control in 1865, were leased as part of a Federal program which sought to employ freedmen on plantations as free workers - a first step for many formerly enslaved persons towards their own economic and personal freedom.