By the late spring of 1865, some 40,000 freed blacks had arrived in Washington looking for work. A number of them found jobs and homes in Maryland or Virginia, thanks in large part to the ministrations of the Freedmen’s Bureau, which was set up to provide just that: work, education, assistance, even in some cases land. Four hundred acres in Arlington had been divided into small lots for rent. But many people were housed in shanties, stables, cellars, or improvised homes knocked together with tarpaper, and they had no wood, no blankets in winter, no means of subsistence.
