FREEDMEN's BUREAU

Congress created the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands in March 1865, assigning it the disposition of rebels' lands and distribution of emergency relief to freed blacks and refugees of both races uprooted by the civil war. Though the Freedmen's Bureau was the first federal human-services organization, its establishment reflected Congress's resistance to constitutional innovation, combined with the pervasive nineteenth-century belief that relief and welfare were beyond the constitutional authority of the federal government. Hence the Bureau was a public-private hybrid, drawing its personnel from the army, assisted by volunteers from the various private relief and welfare organizations working with blacks and soldiers in the South.

The 1865 Act provided that the agency would expire a year after cessation of hostilities. In February 1866, Congress enacted a bill to extend the Bureau's life indefinitely. The bill permitted the President "to extend military protection and jurisdiction over all cases" in which blacks were denied civil rights enjoyed by whites or were punished in ways whites were not. This provision reflected Republicans' resentment at the de jure and de facto discrimination against blacks in the South, especially that authorized by the black codes. Democrats and other conservatives denounced trials before military commissions or "courts" composed of Freedmen's Bureau agents, citing the absence of guarantees of indictment or presentment as violative of the prohibition against military trials of civilians implied in the Fifth Amendment. Republicans countered that the bill was authorized by the enforcement clause (section 2) of the recently ratified thirteenth amendment. The bill thus provided the first opportunity to explore the meaning and extent of this new provision. President andrew johnson vetoed the bill, charging its Republican sponsors with racial favoritism and a disregard of federalism. Congress narrowly sustained the veto, but a similar bill became law four months later over his veto.

In existence until 1874, the Bureau helped blacks to adjust to freedom in the turbulent conditions of the post-war South.

William M. Wiecek
(1986)

Bibliography

Nieman, Donald G. 1979 To Set the Law in Motion: The Freedmen's Bureau and the Legal Rights of Blacks, 1865–1868. Milwood, N.Y.: KTO Press.