Administering Freedom

The State of Emancipation after the Freedmen's Bureau

Dale Kretz

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781469671024, 9781469671017
• eBook ISBN: 9781469671031
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: Social Sciences

This book offers the definitive history of how formerly enslaved men and women pursued federal benefits from the Civil War to the New Deal and, in the process, transformed themselves from a stateless people into documented citizens. As claimants, Black southerners engaged an array of federal agencies. Their encounters with the more familiar Freedmen’s Bureau and Pension Bureau are presented here in a striking new light, while their struggles with the long-forgotten Freedmen’s Branch appear in this study for the very first time.

Based on extensive archival research in rarely used collections, Dale Kretz uncovers surprising stories of political mobilization among tens of thousands of Black claimants for military bounties, back payments, and pensions, finding victories in an unlikely place: the federal bureaucracy. As newly freed, rights-bearing citizens, they negotiated issues of slavery, identity, family, loyalty, dependency, and disability, all within an increasingly complex and rapidly expanding federal administrative state—at once a lifeline to countless Black families and a mainline to a new liberal order.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Chapter One: What Is Left of the Bureau
• Chapter Two: The Unfinished Freedmen’s Branch
• Chapter Three: Reconstructing the Pension Bureau
• Chapter Four: Of War and Theft
• Chapter Five: Some Measure of Justice
• Chapter Six: Pensions for All
• Conclusion
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index