The Freedmen's Bureau

10 Key excerpts on "The Freedmen's Bureau"

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  The Reconstruction Era

  Primary Documents on Events from 1865 to 1877

  • Donna L. Dickerson(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  C H A P T E R 3 The Freedmen's Bureau, 1865-72 uring the months before General Robert E. Lee's surrender, slaves and former slaves abandoned plantations and moved toward Union lines. It fell on the government to create a mechanism by which hun- dreds of thousands of refugees could be clothed, fed, and housed. In some areas, the problem fell directly into the hands of the army. In other areas the ubiquitous "Sanitary Commission"—an agency charged with overseeing the sanitation and health of soldiers—took on the task of dealing with refugees. 1 In March 1865, less than a month before the Confederate surrender, Congress established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands to deal with what most believed would be a short-term program of moving blacks from slavery to freedom. The bureau's operations, confined principally to the relief of freedmen and to the rental of abandoned lands, was to exist only for the duration of the war plus one year. The role of the bureau necessarily grew beyond its original charge. In addition to supervising the disposition of abandoned or confiscated lands and property, bureau officers issued food, clothing, and medicine to desti- tute refugees and freedmen. They established hospitals, schools, and em- ployment offices, as well as camps for the homeless. They registered marriages and eventually assumed the job of helping black veterans file and collect claims for bounties, pensions, and back pay. Most of the bureau agents' efforts were spent overseeing the writing of labor contracts and lis- tening to complaints. As the first social welfare bureaucracy established by the federal gov- ernment, The Freedmen's Bureau was an example of the expanding role of the federal government into the affairs of states. Consequently, many saw the agency as nothing short of a usurpation of states' rights, and every at- tempt was made to undermine and discredit its activities. 29 D

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  Washington during Civil War and Reconstruction

  Race and Radicalism

  • Robert Harrison(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  By incorporating the urban dimension, we gain a full sense of the range and adaptability of the bureau’s programs, and therefore of the potentialities of the postwar American state. As in the states of the former Confederacy, the Freedmen’s Bureau in the District of Columbia played an important role in helping freed- people to negotiate the transition from slavery to freedom. Its officials approached the problems faced by Washington’s freed population in the light of a narrow and constricted version of free labor ideology and, indeed, looked with ambivalence at its very presence there. Yet they acted vigorously not only to move as many freedpeople as possible from the city but also to ameliorate the living conditions of those who remained. The agency was handicapped by its limited financial resources, restricted legal authority, and abbreviated life span, and, of course, in the last analysis, its interventions were insufficient to transform the status and opportunities of Washington’s freed citizens. Nonetheless, they alleviated overcrowd- ing, provided relief for thousands of former slaves, helped many thou- sands more find employment, promoted black schools, and defended the rights of African Americans at a time when they lacked political influence and had few friends in local government. As W. E. B. DuBois concluded more generally, the organization operated as “a vast labor bureau, – not perfect, indeed, notably defective here and there, but on the whole successful beyond the dreams of thoughtful men.” 105 105 Souls of Black Folk, 28.

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  Women's Radical Reconstruction

  The Freedmen's Aid Movement

  • Carol Faulkner(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • University of Pennsylvania Press

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 5

  The Freedmen’s Bureau and Material Aid

  Like African American women, white abolitionist-feminists rebutted notions of black idleness and dependency in order to convince Reconstruction policymakers to grant greater material aid to former slaves. In Washington, D.C., abolitionist-feminists sought work as agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau, responsible for visiting freedpeople in their homes and distributing rations and fuel. Though female agents endorsed the ideal of independence, they also publicized the extreme poverty of former slaves and requested government and Northern assistance. They resolved this paradox by expanding the definition of the deserving poor to include women with children, the families of Union soldiers, the elderly, and the sick.1 Demanding an enduring institution to alleviate the poverty of the most needy freedpeople, these abolitionist-feminists envisioned a radical Freedmen’s Bureau, far different from the temporary agency promoted by Republican politicians, the military, and the American Freedmen’s Union Commission.

  In 1865, few Americans supported a permanent agency to assist former slaves. The American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission recommended only a temporary guardianship, and most Northern whites hoped former slaves would immediately enter into the free workforce and become self-supporting wage laborers. In his autobiography, General O. O. Howard, commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau, explained the tenuous political situation of his agency. He wrote, “From the start I felt sure that the relief offered by the Bureau to the refugees and freedmen through the different channels, being abnormal to our system of Government, would be but temporary.” Howard’s distaste for federal intervention framed the life of the Freedmen’s Bureau. In his view, the bureau was a political anomaly, not fully supported by even its Republican friends.2

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  The Problem of the Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

  The Essential Early Essays

  • W. E. B. Du Bois, Nahum Dimitri Chandler(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Fordham University Press

    (Publisher)

  It extended the existence of the Bureau to July, 1868; it authorized additional assis- tant commissioners, the retention of army officers mustered out of regu- lar service, the sale of certain forfeited lands to freedmen on nominal terms, the sale of Confederate public property for Negro schools, and a wider field of judicial interpretation and cognizance. The government of 19 20 176 The Freedmen’s Bureau the un-reconstructed South was thus put very largely in the hands of the Freedmen’s Bureau, especially as in many cases the departmental mili- tary commander was now made also assistant commissioner. It was thus that the Freedmen’s Bureau became a full-fledged government of men. It made laws, executed them and interpreted them; it laid and collected taxes, defined and punished crime, maintained and used military force, and dictated such measures as it thought necessary and proper for the accomplishment of its varied ends. Naturally, all these powers were not exercised continuously nor to their fullest extent; and yet, as General Howard has said, “scarcely any subject that has to be legislated upon in civil society failed, at one time or another, to demand the action of this singular Bureau.” To understand and criticise intelligently so vast a work, one must not forget an instant the drift of things in the later sixties: Lee had sur- rendered, Lincoln was dead, and Johnson and Congress were at logger- heads; the Thirteenth Amendment was adopted, the Fourteenth pending, and the Fifteenth declared in force in 1870.  Guerrilla raiding, the ever present flickering after-flame of war, was spending its force against the Negroes, and all the Southern land was awakening as from some wild dream to poverty and social revolution.

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  Reconstruction in the United States

  An Annotated Bibliography

  • David Lincove(Author)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  Nonsectarian organizations, mostly from New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, were particularly active during the early years of the war. Black societies also contributed to relief efforts. There were so many organizations participating that there was great confusion, lack of coordination, and wasted resources. 1052. Everly, Elaine C. "Freedmen's Bureau Records: An Overview." Prologue 29 (Summer 1997): 95-99. 111. Everly discusses the value of the large collection of documents produced by the bureau during and after the Civil War until 1872 when the agency ceased to exist. She also describes related groups of documents produced by U.S. government agencies, such as the Quartermaster Generals Office, that collected documents on freedmen in Washington, D. C. The Freedmen's Bureau collection and other agency documents provide incite into the lives of freedmen and the federal government's attempt to aid their transition to freedom. 1053. Everly, Elaine C. "Marriage Registers of Freedmen." Prologue 5 (Fall 1973): 150-154. Ills. Everle writes about the marriage certificates and registers of former slaves that exist in the documentary collections at the National Archives. In general, The Freedmen's Bureau was charged with guaranteeing the availability of legal marriages. State laws were usually followed, but in cases where freedmen were denied a marriage ceremony, bureau officers did it themselves or arranged for it. The records offer information about slave families because many of the couples were married prior to emancipation. 1054. Foster, Gaines, M. "The Limitations of Federal Health Care for Freedmen, 1862-1868." Journal of Southern History 48 (August 1982): 349-372. Tbls. During and after the Civil War the federal government was not organized to provide health services to the mass of freedmen who previously relied on their masters for health care.

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  Inventing American Exceptionalism

  The Origins of American Adversarial Legal Culture, 1800-1877

  • Amalia D. Kessler(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  263 The problem of reconstructing the South was one that consumed much thought in the North as the Civil War was drawing to a close. As Republicans and War Democrats committed to emancipation struggled with the question of how to proceed, they agreed on the need to establish some kind of federal agency responsible for this monumental task, thus giving rise to what would become known as the Freedmen’s Bureau. Such agreement, however, did little to resolve the more difficult question of how exactly this agency and its officers should function. From the Northern perspective, victory in the war served to vindicate the virtues of Northern free labor over the Southern slave system. But while the North and its ideology were triumphant, Northerners soon concluded that get-ting Southerners—both white and black—to absorb the core tenets of the free labor approach would be no easy task. Generations of African-American men forced into dependency and denied the right to marry and form families of their own would have to learn how to exert self-discipline in the workplace and patriarchal authority at home. So too, African-American women needed to develop the womanly virtues of domesticity deemed so essential for becoming proper helpmates and thereby ensuring familial success. Similarly, Southern whites, trained by slavery to view labor as degrading, had to learn the virtue of hard work. Long accustomed to controlling their workforce through violence, they needed to be taught that the interests of capital and labor were in har-mony, such that it was in their own best interest—just as much as that of their former slaves—to respect freedom of contract. As Northern politicians, military officers, and contemporary commentators grappled with the question of how to pursue such a vast project of social 6 • The Freedmen’s Bureau Exception The Triumph of Due (Adversarial) Process and the Dawn of Jim Crow

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  Illustrated Souls of Black Folk

  • W. E. B. Du Bois, Eugene F. Provenzo(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  28 The opponents of the measure declared that the war was over, and the necessity for war measures past; that the Bureau, by reason of its extraordinary powers, was clearly unconstitutional in time of peace, and was destined to irritate the South and pauperize the freedmen, at a final cost of possibly hundreds of millions. These two arguments were unanswered, and indeed unanswerable: the one that the extraordinary powers of the Bureau threatened the civil rights of all citizens; and the other that the government must have power to do what manifestly must be done, and that present abandonment of the freedmen meant their practical re-enslavement. The bill which finally passed enlarged and made permanent the Freedmen’s Bureau. It was promptly vetoed by President Johnson as “unconstitutional,” “unnecessary,” and “extrajudicial,” and failed of passage over the veto. Meantime, however, the breach between Congress and the President began to broaden, and a modified form of the lost bill was finally passed over the President’s second veto, July 16.

  The act of 1866 gave the Freedmen’s Bureau its final form,—the form by which it will be known to posterity and judged of men. It extended the existence of the Bureau to July 1868; it authorized additional assistant commissioners, the retention of army officers mustered out of regular service, the sale of certain forfeited lands to freedmen on nominal terms, the sale of Confederate public property for Negro schools, and a wider field of judicial interpretation and cognizance. The government of the unreconstructed South was thus put very largely in the hands of the Freedmen’s Bureau, especially as in many cases the departmental military commander was now made also assistant commissioner. It was thus that the Freedmen’s Bureau became a full-fledged government of men. It made laws, executed them and interpreted them; it laid and collected taxes, defined and punished crime, maintained and used military force, and dictated such measures as it thought necessary and proper for the accomplishment of its varied ends. Naturally, all these powers were not exercised continuously nor to their fullest extent; and yet, as General Howard has said, “scarcely any subject that has to be legislated upon in civil society failed, at one time or another, to demand the action of this singular Bureau.”

  “All ages in class at primary school for Freedmen,” Harper’s Weekly , June 23, 1866, p. 392.

  To understand and criticise intelligently so vast a work, one must not forget an instant the drift of things in the later sixties. Lee had surrendered, Lincoln was dead, and Johnson and Congress were at loggerheads; the Thirteenth Amendment was adopted, the Fourteenth pending, and the Fifteenth declared in force in 1870.29

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  The Struggle for Equality

  Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction - Updated Edition

  • James M. McPherson(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  Freedmen’s aid societies could not help the Negroes unless they were assisted by a sympathetic and powerful government agency. An emancipation bureau was needed “to see that Justice, that the right of fair trial, that a field for his labor, are secured to the Negro.” 5 Garrisonian abolitionists seconded the demand for an emancipation bureau. “Without fitting measures, [the Emancipation Proclamation] is worth little to our generation,” said Wendell Phillips in January 1863. “Long before this, there should have been created a ‘Bureau of Freedmen,’ to guard and aid the advent of these millions into the condition of freedmen.” Edmund Quincy wanted an agency “to make provision for the first necessities of the freedmen, to allot them lands out of those forfeited by the rebels, [and] to organize and protect their labor.” The Massachusetts and New York Anti-Slavery Societies passed resolutions urging creation of a bureau “for the special purpose of guarding the rights and interests of the liberated bondsmen, providing them with land and labor, and giving them a fair chance to develop their faculties and powers through the necessary educational instrumentalities.” 6 Abolitionists realized that they would have a better case for a freedmen’s bureau if they could present reliable facts about the condition of the freedmen. “We must be able to present,” wrote Samuel Gridley Howe, “as early as possible, a general and reliable coup d’oeil of the actual condition of those who are actually out of the house of bondage; their wants and their capacities. We must collect facts and use them as ammunition.” In pursuance of Howe’s suggestion the Emancipation League in December 1862 sent a questionnaire to superintendents and supervisors of freedmen’s affairs

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  A History of the Freedmen's Bureau

  • George R. Bentley(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • University of Pennsylvania Press Anniversary Collection

    (Publisher)

  73 Two other fields in which the Bureau began its work in 1865, but in which it was slow to achieve its full potentialities, were education and justice. Its agents adjudicated hundreds of cases as part of their first year's work, but Howard's major attempt to organize a real Bureau court system came later. Similarly, while the Bureau did what it could for Negro schools in its earliest months, it was not yet able to do much more than give the northern benevolent societies its moral support. It did turn over to them government buildings no longer being used by the military, and it gave free transportation to their teachers. 74 But it could not yet begin its work of paying teachers, building schoolhouses, or establishing colleges and universities. One of the teachers at Montgomery later wrote of this period, Certainly had I foreseen the slackness and inefficiency that have paralyzed my efforts here . . . resulting [largely] . . . from the apparent helplessness of the Bureau during most of the first 10 months, I should have sought another field. 75 Finally in one area of the work it had been expected to do the Freed-men's Bureau made almost no beginning at all in 1865. That was in the assigning of confiscated and abandoned land to refugees and freedmen. In that matter the Bureau was having real trouble—a difference of opinion, then a controversy, with the President of the United States. As he restored the abandoned lands to pardoned southerners, the Bureau lost its antici-pated income. And as it tried to keep this source of revenue, it incurred 87 A HISTORY OF THE FREED,»ENS BUREAU the bitter opposition of the President. Of course it had to keep this income, or get some other, or it would never be able to advance much further in some of its fields of work than it had in 1865. 88

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  The Freedmen's Bureau, Politics, And Stability Operations During Reconstruction In The South

  • Major William H. Burks USAF(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Golden Springs Publishing

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 2 — THE FREEDMEN’S BUREAU AND ANDREW JOHNSON

  Picking a Commissioner

  Before Congress passed the act establishing the Bureau for Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, a bevy of organizations served the growing masses of freedmen in the South. Benevolent associations established schools to educate former slaves while multiple government agencies, including representatives from the War and Treasury Departments, organized the freed masses as best they could around Union strong points and provided land where able to allow growing of crops. Naturally, the services rendered to the needy were not uniform as war still wreaked havoc in portions of the Confederacy; the majority of relief efforts were thus confined to points along the coast and areas under the control and protection of Union armies.{57} The Congressional act set the stage for the Freedmen’s Bureau to unify efforts in the care, education, and integration of the freedmen into American society.

  On 9 May 1865, a full month after Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant accepted the surrender of the Confederate Army of Virginia’s General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Courthouse, combat operations between Union and Confederate forces continued in portions of the Deep South.{58} However, all was relatively quiet in Virginia as Union Army of the Tennessee commander Major General Oliver Otis (O.O.) Howard and his forces arrived in the town of Manchester on the edge of Richmond that morning. Howard and his army served with Major General William T. Sherman on the famous march through Georgia and were now headed to Washington, D.C. to participate in the celebrations concluding the Civil War. After a brief visit to Richmond, a courier handed Howard an urgent message from General Grant ordering him to leave his army and report immediately to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. Howard and Stanton met on 11 May 1865 to discuss the next major chapter in the young general’s life.{59}

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