Indenture for "...Colored Child Named Maria,." December 21, 1865

Immediately after the Civil War, defeated white Southerners tried to remake the South as they had known it before the war. With slavery abolished, some whites devised labor contracts which forced African Americans back into near-slave conditions. This indenture, imposed on "a poor orphan colored child," required her to work for a white master until she came of age.