Near the end of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Freedmen’s Bureau Act into law. Sponsored by Republican Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, this law established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, also known as the Freedmen’s Bureau. Its ostensible purpose was to aid destitute former slaves, but like most government bureaucracies, the Bureau was influenced by politics and thus produced many unintended consequences.
Rationale for the Bureau
When the war ended and slavery was abolished, many in Congress argued that an agency was needed to help former slaves transition to freedom. Thus the Bureau was created to provide food, clothing, shelter and fuel to former slaves. Bureau agents were also empowered to marry slave couples and help reunite slave families separated by war and/or slavery. Poor southern whites were also included, but few participated.
In addition, Bureau agents provided medical assistance and education. During the Bureau’s existence, thousands of hospitals, primary schools, industrial schools and teacher-training institutions were created in the South. Agents also rented abandoned lands to former slaves and mediated labor disputes between former slaves and landowners.
Criticism of the Bureau
Having just lost a devastating war, having had much of their homeland destroyed, and having their economy and way of life obliterated, most southern whites viewed the Freedmen’s Bureau with suspicion and resentment. Not only was the presence of Bureau agents in the South a reminder that the South had lost the war, but the federal intervention infringed on the principles of state sovereignty that so many southerners had fought and died for.
The education provided to former slaves came from northern teachers and northern government textbooks, which raised fears among many southerners that blacks were being taught to hate southern whites. In addition, the education was often funded by local taxpayers, many of whom were landowners and former Confederates that were not allowed to participate.
Many landowners lodged criticisms of Bureau agents, believing that the agents unfairly sided with the former slaves in labor disputes. Southerners argued that Bureau agents had a political agenda in mind; after all, if agents did not fuel racial tension and turn blacks against whites, there would be no disputes to mediate and the Bureau jobs would no longer be needed.
President Johnson’s Veto
In 1866, Congress passed a bill expanding the Freedmen’s Bureau by creating a military police force and a court system to moderate relations between blacks and whites in the South. This bill was vetoed by President Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor.
In his veto message, Johnson declared, “I cannot reconcile a system of military jurisdiction of this kind with the Constitution.” His argument included the following points:
- The Constitution did not provide for such massive federal intervention into state affairs.
- The presence of federal agents and military would only exacerbate racial tensions in the South.
- Such a massive bureaucracy, controlled almost exclusively by Republicans, would be an enormous vehicle for political corruption and abuse of power.
Most members of Congress favoring the Bureau’s expansion belonged to the radical faction of the Republican Party. These radicals argued that even though there was no constitutional justification, an expanded Freedmen’s Bureau was needed to combat white vigilante groups such as the Ku Klux Klan that were forming to terrorize blacks in the South. Eventually Congress overrode Johnson’s veto and passed the expanded Bureau bill into law.
The End of the Bureau
The Bureau’s inescapable flaw was that it was run by bureaucrats with political interests at stake. Since most Bureau agents were Republicans, they often worked to ensure that former slaves were also Republicans, even though most property owners and taxpayers in the South were white Democrats. This heightened racial tensions, which not only made the Bureau less effective, but actually made blacks more vulnerable to white terrorism than they otherwise would have been.
The Freedmen’s Bureau had proposed to grant every former slave "forty acres and a mule" to begin a new life of freedom, but that proposal was never carried out. In 1868, Congress terminated the Bureau, citing that black advancement had made the Bureau obsolete. In reality, waning northern interest in southern affairs led to the Bureau’s demise.
While the Bureau’s initial encroachment in the South helped fuel racial tension, the Bureau’s exit left southern blacks to fend for themselves in this racially-charged atmosphere. The result was the beginning of the Jim Crow era of racial segregation and nearly another century of black second-class citizenship in the South.
Sources
Bowers, Claude: The Tragic Era (Cambridge, MA: The Riverside Press, 1929)
Richardson, Heather Cox: West from Appomattox (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007)
Woods Jr., Thomas E.: The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2004)
Walter Coffey - Walter Coffey is a freelance writer who resides in Houston, Texas. Walter has written several works of historical fiction and non-fiction, ...
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