Freedmen's Bureau

Freedmen's Bureau. To assist the adjustment of newly freed slaves in the post–Civil War South, Congress in March 1865 established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands under the leadership of General Oliver Otis Howard and the auspices of the War Department. Given an initial life of one year, the agency provided food, clothing, fuel, and medical treatment to destitute and dislocated freedpeople and white refugees. It was also supposed to parcel out abandoned and confiscated lands in forty‐acre plots to freedmen, but President Andrew Johnson, a staunch critic of the agency, undercut this effort by restoring most of the available land to its former white owners. Local Bureau agents thus spent much time mediating labor contracts and disputes between the freedmen and intransigent white employers and attempting to secure economic and civil justice for the freedmen—even as they slipped into a debilitating sharecropping system.

More positive was the Bureau's work with northern philanthropic groups to establish some three thousand freedpeople's schools by 1869. Congress renewed the Bureau for two years over Johnson's veto in July 1866 and personnel reached a high of nine hundred, but as the ex‐Confederate states rejoined the Union, Congress limited the agency's work to education and bounty payments to African American soldiers. Sharply reduced in personnel by 1869, the Freedmen's Bureau ceased operations in June 1872. Overall the Bureau provided invaluable relief and educational aid for the 3.9 million former slaves, but its initial promise was limited by inadequate funding and manpower, excessively paternalistic leadership, and deeply embedded racial antagonisms.
See also African Americans; Reconstruction; Sharecropping and Tenantry.

Bibliography

George R. Bentley , A History of the Freedmen's Bureau, 1955.
William S. McFeely , Yankee Stepfather: General O.O. Howard and the Freedmen, 1968.

Terry L. Seip