From the Richmond Examiner, 2/10/1866, p. 3, c. 3

FOUND DEAD. – Early one cold, bitter morning, this week, the dead body of a negro man was found on the bridge leading from Marshall street to Chimborazo Hospital, now the Asylum for freed negroes. He was lying stark and stiff, his ebony shrunken face turned heavenward, his bony hands outstretched – begging for bread still. And so near the classic hill, so near the asylum for poor freedmen, women and children, right under the shadow and protecting wings of the “Freedmen’s Bureau”! A group of tatterdemailion negroes, brother freedmen, gathered about the corpse; one said he knew him; his name was “Tom”; that was all; he had a kind master before the blessed day of freedom dawned. They searched his pockets, and a piece of candle and a comb were the only articles found among the mass of rags that clothed his attenuated person. A coroner’s jury of twelve men sat on poor Cuffee’s body, but no information as to the cause that summoned death so hastily could be elicited by white men. “Death from starvation,” was the mental verdict of the group of four negroes who lifted the corpse, and silently and mournfully on that cold, frosty morning, bore and consigned it to the keeping of old mother Earth, that is ever opening her bosom to shelter the pauper “wards of the nation,” at last. They buried him in the new negro cemetery, which the Freedmen’s Bureau has found necessary to establish for the convenience of the negro colony settled at Chimborazo Hill. The new settlement of the dead is populated by between two and three hundred graves, we should judge. Here the negro comes to rest. They stuck up a head board and marked it “Tom” – that was all. He has gone to the new settlement, and his brethren and sisters are following him daily.

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