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Black History Month: The Freedmen's Bureau

The Freedmen’s Bureau was a government agency established by an Act of Congress that was passed on March 3, 1865, just before the end of the Civil War. It was supposed to be a temporary body that was only intended to last for the duration of the war and one year afterward. It operated under the authority of the War Department and the majority of its original bureaucrats were Union soldiers. It's full title was "the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands", but it was referred to simply as the Freedmen's Bureau. Its job was to "direct such issues of provisions, clothing, and fuel, as he may deem needful for the immediate and temporary shelter and supply of destitute and suffering refugees and freedmen and their wives and children."



The Freedmen's Bureau Bill was the idea of President Abraham Lincoln. Though Lincoln would not live to see the bureau in operation, it was an important agency of early Reconstruction, helping former slaves, known as "freedmen", in the South. The Department of War was the only agency with an existing organization that could operate in the South. It was headed by Union Army General Oliver Otis Howard. During its first year, the Freedmen's Bureau representatives confronted the problem of dealing with Southern legislatures that had passed laws known as "Black Codes" that restricted movement, conditions of labor, and other civil rights of African Americans, which closely resembled their conditions of slavery. The Freedmen's Bureau controlled most of the arable land in the south.

The Freedmen's Bureau's powers included helping African Americans find family members from whom they had become separated during the war. It also offered education, teaching them to read and write, something that was considered to be an important component of the program. Bureau agents also served as legal advocates for African Americans in local and national courts. It also worked to reestablish the southern economy by getting former major planters to rebuild their plantations and hire freedmen to work for them, but under reasonable terms of employment as employers and employees and not as masters and slaves.

The Bureau helped newly freed slaves obtain clothing, food, water, health care, communication with family members, and jobs. Between 1865 and 1869, it distributed 15 million rations of food to freed African Americans. It also distributed 5 million rations to impoverished white families. It also set up a system in which planters could borrow rations to feed freedmen they employed. The Bureau set aside $350,000 for this service, but only $35,000 was borrowed by planters.

From the start, the Bureau faced resistance from a variety of sources, including many white Southerners. President Andrew Johnson had assumed office in April 1865 following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. When Congress introduced a bill in February 1866 to extend the bureau’s tenure and give it new legal powers, Johnson vetoed the proposed legislation. His grounds were that it interfered with states’ rights, it gave preference to one group of citizens over another and would impose a huge financial burden on the federal government. In July, Congress overrode Johnson’s veto and passed a revised version of the bill. Johnson became embroiled in a bitter fight with the Radical Republicans in Congress, who viewed the president’s Reconstruction policies as too lenient, and the Freedmen’s Bureau suffered as a result. Johnson’s actions included pardoning many former Confederates and restoring their land, as well as removing bureau employees he thought were too sympathetic to African Americans. All of this served to undermine the bureau’s authority.



Another problem encountered by the bureau was in providing medical treatment to the freedmen. Most southern white doctors and nurses would not treat freedmen, and the freedmen themselves were not given the opportunity to develop their own medical personnel. In this period epidemics of cholera and yellow fever were carried along river corridors, often with higher rates of affliction among the freemen.

Commensurate with the times, the Freedman's Bureau did not operate in the same spirit of equality that might otherwise be expected. When freed women refused to contract their labor, the Bureau attempted to force them to work by insisting that their husbands sign contracts making the whole family available as field labor in the cotton industry, and by declaring that unemployed freed women should be treated as vagrants if they did not agree to this work. Some exceptions were made for married women with employed husbands, and some women who had been widowed or abandoned and had large families of small children to care for.

Under slavery, most marriages were informal, and slaveholders refused to acknowledge slave marriage. After the war, the Freedmen's Bureau performed numerous marriages for freed couples who requested them. Bureau agents helped families in their efforts to reunite after the war. The Bureau sometimes provided transportation to reunite families. Freedmen and freed women turned to the Bureau for assistance in resolving issues of abandonment and divorce.

Prior to the War, no southern state had a system of universal, state-supported public education. These states prohibited all African Americans from obtaining formal education. Oliver Otis Howard was appointed as the first Freedmen's Bureau Commissioner. During the war, Howard earned the nickname of the “Christian General.” He had fought in major battles, including Antietam and Gettysburg, and lost an arm in the Battle of Fair Oaks in 1862. Through his leadership the bureau set up four divisions: Government-Controlled Lands, Records, Financial Affairs, and Medical Affairs. Education was considered part of the Records division. Howard turned over confiscated property including planters' mansions, government buildings, books, and furniture to superintendents to be used in the education of freedmen, and provided transportation and room and board for teachers. Many Northerners came south to educate the freedmen. Northern missionary and aid societies worked in conjunction with the Freedmen's Bureau to provide education for former slaves. The American Missionary Association established eleven colleges in southern states for the education of freedmen. After 1866, Congress appropriated some funds to operate the freedmen's schools. An Act of Congress gave the Freedmen's Bureau the power to seize Confederate property for educational use.

Overall, the Bureau spent $5 million to set up these schools. By the end of 1865, more than 90,000 former slaves were enrolled as students in such public schools. Attendance rates at the new schools for freedmen were between 79 and 82 percent. The Freedmen's Bureau published their own freedmen's textbooks. These included traditional literacy lessons, selections on the life and works of Abraham Lincoln, excerpts from the Bible, biographies of famous African Americans, and essays on work ethic, temperance, and the golden rule.

By 1870, there were more than 1,000 schools for freedmen in the South. After the Bureau was abolished, many of these were destroyed by acts of violence. After the 1870s, when white Democrats regained power of southern governments, they reduced funds available to fund public education for African Americans. In the 1890s they passed a new state constitutions disenfranchising most African Americans by creating barriers to voter registration. They passed Jim Crow laws establishing legal segregation on public places. Segregated schools and other services for freedmen were intentionally underfunded by the southern legislatures.

In March 1872, at the request of President Ulysses S. Grant and the Secretary of the Interior, Columbus Delano, General Howard was asked to temporarily leave his duties as Commissioner of the Bureau to deal with Indian affairs in the west. While General Howard was dealing with Indian affairs in the west, the Freedmen's Bureau was steadily losing its support. During the Bureau's first year, Congress appropriated no money for the Bureau so it was forced to rely on the army for financial support. Because the Bureau had a lack of funding from the federal government, it was unable to carry out all of its initiatives to protect the lives of the newly freed slaves.

Congress was forced to dismantle the Bureau in 1872 due to pressure from white Southerners. In his autobiography, General Howard expressed great frustration in regard to what had taken place in his absence. He wrote: "the legislative action, however, was just what I desired, except that I would have preferred to close out my own Bureau and not have another do it for me in an unfriendly manner in my absence."



In 2000, Congress passed the Freedmen's Bureau Preservation Act, which directed the National Archivist to preserve the extensive records of the Bureau on microfilm, and to index the records. The National Archives now has records of the field offices, marriage records, and records of the Freedmen's Branch of the Adjutant General on microfilm. The Freedmen's Bureau Project was announced on June 19, 2015. in partnerships with FamilySearch International and the National Archives and Records Administration, the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society, and the California African American Museum. Tens of thousands of volunteers are working to make these records searchable online. Volunteers are asked to log on to http://www.discoverfreedmen.org/, pull up as many scanned documents as they like, and enter the names and dates into the fields provided.
Tags: abraham lincoln, andrew johnson, civil rights, civil war, slavery, ulysses s. grant
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