Bureau of Freedmen, Refugees, and
Abandoned Lands
Reconstruction-era relief agency.
Congress established this temporary agency, commonly
called the Freedmen’s Bureau, in March of 1865 as part of the
U.S. War Department. Its primary function was to provide
practical assistance to four million former slaves as they made
the transition from bondage to freedom. The task proved
daunting, to say the least. The bureau operated in a region
ravaged by war and acutely conflicted by competing visions
of postwar Southern society, one white and one black.
Although Southern whites accepted the act of emancipation,
they feared a new order that included full social and political
equality for African Americans. The former slaves craved true
freedom, which they interpreted as independence from white
control through land ownership, franchise, and the establishment of their own institutions.
General Oliver Otis Howard, a devout Evangelical
Christian wounded during the Civil War, led the bureau as
commissioner with the aid of assistant commissioners in
each Southern state. Although the agency distributed badly
needed food and medical supplies to destitute blacks and
whites alike, insufficient resources coupled with the highly
charged political climate of the period retarded its long-term
effectiveness. Nevertheless, the bureau played an active role in
the lives of the freedmen for several years. Freedmen’s Bureau
agents negotiated labor contracts between whites and blacks,
adjudicated labor disputes between white landowners and
their black employees, supervised state and local courts in
their general treatment of the freedmen, and helped reunite
black families separated by slavery and the war. The greatest
accomplishments of the bureau were in the field of education: It paid teachers’ salaries, supported school construction,
34 Bureau of Corporationsand established black colleges and a system of schools that
would survive Reconstruction and lay the foundation for
public education in the South.
With the notable exception of its education programs, the
bureau’s efforts to provide long-term aid to former slaves
lasted only a short time. Ambitious plans to redistribute land
never materialized. By the time he left office, President
Andrew Johnson, who opposed the bureau, had pardoned
most of the ex-Confederates and restored to them hundreds
of thousands of confiscated acres once earmarked for sale to
freedmen. In 1866 the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in
ex parte Milligan that military courts had no authority in
areas where civilian courts functioned, thus casting serious
doubts on the legality of martial law and the Freedmen’s
Bureau courts. A lack of funding and staff (for instance, at
any given time no more than 20 agents operated in the state
of Alabama) continued to plague the agency, as did growing
apathy among Northern politicians with regard to the entire
Reconstruction process. As the white Democratic Party grew
stronger in the South, its leaders stepped up their resistance
to the bureau, disparaging it as nothing more than a corrupt
political tool of the Republican Congress. Ultimately crushed
under the weight of the social and political struggles of the
period, the Freedmen’s Bureau ceased operation in 1872,
leaving a mixed legacy.