Linking individual data on depositors with a 1% sample of the 1870 census, Stein and Yannelis (2020), SY2020 henceforth, argues that the Freedman's Savings Bank, the first bank collecting deposits from African Americans, had large positive effects on the wealth, literacy, school attendance, income and business ownership of the recently freed population. We show that, in SY2020, (i) the historical statements supporting the assumptions of the identification strategy are incorrect, (ii) the sample has representativeness, replicability, and selection issues, (iii) the linking strategy has a false positive rate higher than 95\%, and (iv) the instrumental variable analysis and placebo tests are not conclusive. Therefore, one cannot draw conclusions on short term effects of the Freedman's Savings Bank from SY2020's empirical setting.