At the end of the Civil War, the United States Congress and President Lincoln recognized the need to aid newly freed black men and women in their transition to freedom. To support the land grants and other elements of the Freedman’s Bureau Act, a Freedman’s Bank was established on March 3, 1865 to help newly freed African Americans navigate their financial lives.

During its existence, The Freedman’s Bank maintained some 37 offices in 17 states, including the District of Columbia. At its height, the Bank had over $57 million in deposits (adjusted for inflation) and 70,000 depositors.

Five weeks after the creation of the Freedman’s Bank, President Lincoln was assassinated.

Seven years later, In June of 1872, the U.S. Congress voted to permanently close the Freedman’s Bureau. The Bank however remained operational and in 1874 Frederick Douglass was asked to run the Freedman’s Bank as its D.C. branch relocated to a new home across from the U.S. Department of Treasury, in a grand building which cost $260,000 to construct.

When Frederick Douglass arrived at the Bank’s new location in Washington D.C. he wrote:

“The whole thing was beautiful. I had read of this bank when I lived in Rochester, and had indeed been solicited to become one of its trustees, and had reluctantly consented to do so: but when I came to Washington and saw its magnificent brown stone front, its towering height, its perfect appointments, and the fine display it made in the transaction of its business, I felt like the Queen of Sheba when she saw the riches of Solomon, that ‘half had not been told me’.”

However, when Douglass came on as the Bank’s director, he found rampant corruption within the Bank and risky investments across industries being made with depositor’s savings. In a desperate attempt to stabilize the Bank, Douglass invested $10,000 of his personal funds, but sadly, later that year, in June of 1874 the Bank failed against the backdrop of the political forces that undermined Reconstruction.

In the District alone over 3,000 depositors—both individuals and cultural institutions—lost their savings, adding to the overall total loss of $3 million. While the failure of the Freedman’s Bank was tragic and left many African Americans with feelings of distrust of the American banking system, the records created by the bank are a rich source of documentation for black family research for the period immediately following the American Civil War. The records of twenty-nine branches of the Freedman’s Savings Bank, including those of the Washington D.C. office, still survive today and are searchable at the National Archives.

Thousands of signature cards containing personal data about individual depositors, including names and ages of depositors, in some cases places of birth, residence, and occupations; names of parents, spouses, children, brothers, and sisters; and in some cases, the names of former slave owners. These records of the individuals, who lived through the transition from slavery to freedom, are the keys that allow their descendants to unlock the mysteries of their largely undocumented family histories.