Freedmen's Bureau

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FREEDMEN'S BUREAU

After the end of the American Civil War (1861–1865) in April 1865, the newly reunited United States faced a humanitarian disaster on a scale not before seen. In the battle-torn South, cities, plantations, and crops had been burned, railroads were destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of whites and newly freed blacks suffered from disease and hunger. Also, most of the four million newly freed slaves were illiterate and largely incapable of succeeding in the postwar economy. In response to the suffering and the need to reintegrate the rebel states back into the Union, the U.S. government introduced an unprecedented bureaucracy of relief effort. The most important arm of this bureaucracy was the Freedmen's Bureau.

The Freedmen's Bureau was established by Congress as the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands on March 3, 1865, to aid and protect former slaves after the end of the war. Its original charter was for one year. On July 16, 1866, the Bureau was reorganized under the U.S. War Department, which gave it the backing of military force. The 200,000 federal troops occupying the southern states helped establish military law and order. As a result of its military ties, the Freedmen's Bureau became one of the most powerful tools wielded by the federal government during Reconstruction (1865–1877).

The first commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau was General Oliver O. Howard, who had the power to organize the former slave regions into a structure that the Bureau could oversee. Howard created ten districts out of the slave-holding states, including those slave-holding states that had remained in the Union during the war. The work of the Freedmen's Bureau was concentrated to five areas: relief work for all citizens in war-torn areas; regulation of black labor; management of abandoned and confiscated property; administration of justice for blacks; and the education of former slaves. The Bureau compiled an impressive record in the first and last of these areas, but it had little success in setting up former slaves as landowners. During the summer of 1865 alone, the Freedmen's Bureau distributed 150,000 food rations daily—50,000 of those to white refugees. During the life of the Bureau, more than 22 million rations were given out.

The lack of success in setting up former slaves as landowners came as a result of President Andrew Johnson's (1865–1869) May 29, 1865 Proclamation of Pardon and Amnesty to all southern citizens who would take an oath of allegiance. It applied to everyone except military officers and government officials. The amnesty restored property rights, excluding slaves, to all those owning property worth less than $20,000 and, thus, reduced the land pool preserved for distribution to freed slaves. General Howard at first refused to give back property to whites, but on August 16, 1865, President Johnson ordered him specifically to do so. Regardless of the Radical Republicans' intentions, which were to transfer massive amounts of land from former slave owners to freedmen, their efforts were largely a failure.

Finally, the Bureau operated as a patronage machine for the Republican Party. They traded favors to freedmen in the South in exchange for votes. This, along with the fact that the Bureau was instrumental in helping former slaves get elected to political office, helped to create political hatreds that lasted well into the twentieth century. The Freedmen's Bureau was also the focus of political troubles in places outside the South. Congress passed a bill in 1866 to increase the powers of the Bureau and extend its life indefinitely. President Johnson vetoed the bill on February 19, 1866, on the grounds that it was an unconstitutional continuation of the war and that it was too soon to extend the full rights of citizenship to blacks. The veto escalated Johnson's long and ultimately futile battle with the Republican Congress over Reconstruction policy. Congress passed another bill extending the Freedmen's Bureau for three years, overriding Johnson's veto on July 16, 1866. The majority of the work of the Freedmen's Bureau was discontinued on July 1, 1869, though the educational activities continued until 1872, when Ulysses S. Grant (1869–1877) was elected president.

See also: Civil War (Economic Impact of), Reconstruction, Slavery