FREEDMEN'S BUREAU

FREEDMEN'S BUREAU. On 3 March 1865, Congress established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, or the Freedmen's Bureau, to assist black Americans in their transition from slavery to freedom at the end of the CIVIL WAR. The bureau provided emergency food, shelter, and medical care to people dislocated by the war; established schools; conducted military courts to hear complaints of both former slaves and former masters; put freedmen to work on abandoned or confiscated lands; and supervised the postemancipation work arrangements made by the freedmen.

Congress assigned the Bureau to the WAR DEPARTMENT; President Johnson named Major General O. O. Howard commissioner. He also appointed assistant commissioners in the seceded states to direct the work of the Freedmen's Bureau agents, who were sent into the field. Congress did not appropriate any money for agent salaries, so army commanders detailed young officers for Bureau duty as agents. A few of them were black officers, but resentment by some powerful white people caused most of these agents to be either discharged or moved into relatively uncontroversial posts in the education division. In 1868 bureau officials numbered nine hundred.

Howard, known to some as the "Christian General," had a charitable attitute toward the freedmen. He had commanded an army in General William Tecumseh SHERMAN'S MARCH TO THE SEA and had visited the South Carolina coastal islands seized in 1861 from fleeing planters. Plantations there had been divided into small holdings and farmed successfully by former slaves. With this example in mind, Congress directed the bureau to divide similarly abandoned lands across the South into forty-acre units and award them to the freedmen. Shortly thereafter President Andrew Johnson abrogated this important precedent for land redistribution by using presidential pardons to return to white former owners nearly all the land that was to have been divided.

With the restoration of the lands to white owners, bureau agents tried to convince the freedmen to support themselves and their families by entering into contracts, either for labor to work in field gangs or for land to farm as tenants or SHARECROPPERS. In addition to encouraging and supervising these work arrangements, the bureau, during its seven years of existence, also appropriated more than $15 million for food and other aid to the freedmen. Agents distributed these funds throughout the southern and border states in which most of the nation's four million black citizens lived.

The most important continuing contribution of the Freedmen's Bureau was in the area of education. Private freedmen's aid societies supplied teachers and their salaries; the bureau supplied buildings and transportation. Howard participated enthusiastically in fundraising for the schools, particularly after the early efforts at land re-form had been aborted. By 1871 eleven colleges and universities and sixty-one normal schools had been founded. Among the most important were Hampton Institute, Atlanta University, Talladega College, Straight College (later Dillard University), Fisk University, and Howard University. The bureau spent over $6 million for its schools and educational work.

Congress never intended that the Freedmen's Bureau would be a permanent agency. The original authorization was for one year. In 1866, over President Johnson's veto, Congress extended the life of the agency and enhanced its powers. The Freedmen's Bureau was closed in 1872. Its legacies were the colleges begun under its auspices and the aspirations engendered among African Americans.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cimbala, Paul A., and Randall M. Miller, eds. The Freedmen's Bureau and Reconstruction: Reconsiderations. New York: Fordham University Press, 1999.

Cox, LaWanda, "From Emancipation to Segregation: National Policy and Southern Blacks." In Interpreting Southern History: Historiographical Essays in Honor of Sanford W. Higginbotham. Edited by John B. Boles and Evelyn Thomas Nolan. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987.

Crouch, Barry A. The Freedmen's Bureau and Black Texans. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992.

McFeely, William S. Yankee Stepfather: General O. O. Howard and the Freedmen. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1968.

Nieman, Donald G., ed. The Freedmen's Bureau and Black Freedom. Vol. 2: African American Life in the Post-Emancipation South, 1861–1900. New York: Garland, 1994.