This collection consists of an order issued by Colonel Orlando Brown, superintendent of the 8th District of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (Freedmen's Bureau) September 14, 1865 written from Christiansburg, Virginia. Special Order No. 12 requested the assistant superintendent of the bureau to report on the condition of freedmen in their districts in terms of whether they were willing to work for their former masters, how they were working, how their former masters treated them, whether they were willing to rent their former masters land. It also inquired if those who refused to work were doing so because of wages or "because they are disposed to be idle?"