Excerpt from Emancipation in the District of Columbia: Letter From the Secretary of the Treasury, in Answer to a Resolution of the House of Representatives, of the 11th of JanuaryIn these preliminary arrangements for entering upon their labors the commis sioners had the benefit of the legal learning and experience of the Hon. Samuel F. Vinton, but hardly were they completed when the relentless hand of death, by a sudden stroke, severed a connexion which promised to be as useful to the public'as it was agreeable to his colleagues. He died on Sunday, the eleventh day of May, after a brief illness. The vacancy thus created in the board was filled by the appointment of John M. Brodhead, who entered upon the discharge of his duties on the fourteenth day of June.By the terms of the act the claimants for compensation were required to file their petitions within three months from the date of its approval. This period expired on the fifteenth day of July. The whole number of petitions presented during this time was nine hundred and sixty-six, and the number of persons held to service or labor embraced in the petitions, for whom compensation was claimed, is three thousand one hundred. In order to secure the government against imposition, a complete list of the names of the petitioners, together with those of the servants claimed by them, was made out by order of the commis sioners, and published in all the newspapers of the city, as a means of eliciting evidence to rebut claims founded in fraud, or emanating from persons whom the law designed to exclude on the ground of disloyalty.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.