NARRATOR
That same fall, nine black soldiers and their white captain climbed aboard a sternwheeler in New Orleans, and headed up river. The captain, Marshall Twitchell, was a career soldier from Vermont who had led black troops during the war. He had fought at Antietam, Fredericksburg, the Wilderness, and just about every other major battle in the East.

TUNNELL
Twitchell is one of those Union veterans who enlist in the first year of the war and stays the duration. He's wounded several times. He gets a Minie ball right in his face. It cuts a grove around his face and exits behind his ear. He'll have the scar for the rest of his life.

NARRATOR
The war was over, and Twitchell was restless. In New Orleans, he got himself a commission in the Freedmen's Bureau. In the chaotic post-war South, the job of the Freedmen's Bureau agent was to smooth the transition from slavery to freedom. The Bureau built schools for the former slaves and fed and clothed war refugees, black and white. Twitchell was posted to Bienville Parish, in northern Louisiana, a place he knew nothing about.

TUNNELL
Here he is on a sternwheeler, heading up the Red River. This region had never been conquered. So he's entering the last part of the Confederacy to surrender. It is dangerous, exotic. It's isolated. And he doesn't know it, but he is entering what is probably the most violent place in America. It's no coincidence that Harriet Beecher Stowe chose to put the final, brutal ending of Uncle Tom's Cabin, where Uncle Tom is beaten to death by Simon Legree, it's no coincidence that she puts it on the upper Red River. It's a violent region.

NARRATOR
"I was without telegraphy, railway or water connections," remembered Twitchell. "If I'd known beforehand what my position was to be, I should have remained with my regiment." At the courthouse in Sparta, the county seat, Captain Twitchell set up office as the sole Freedmen's Bureau agent for the parish. He soon discovered his new neighbors were as hardened to battle as he was.

MARSTON
My great-grandfather had two brothers killed in the war, and another wounded. And I'm named after one of 'em. There wasn't a family here that didn't lose someone to the war. But in our little area, these veterans were never defeated and that is a lot of the feeling here. The war just ended and so everybody went home. And up into the midst of this came Twitchell.

TUNNELL
The people of the area are wary. They don't quite know what to expect, but they quickly discover that this Freedman's Bureau agent is somebody that they're going to have to deal with.

NARRATOR
Agents like Twitchell had military authority to settle labor disputes and conflicts between former slaves and masters.

TUNNELL
Planters certainly resented this intrusion into so sensitive an area. They wanted direct control over black labor. They didn't want some Yankee Freedman's Bureau agent there questioning their behavior, actually sitting them down and having them testify in an open hearing. And for the freedmen, here was somebody that they could go to if they were mistreated. He can't fundamentally change the economic lives of these people. All he can do is try to be a mediator; to give them some degree of justice.

NARRATOR
Twitchell would soon learn that for a Yankee officer all alone in northwest Louisiana, even a degree of federal justice might be too much.