The Freedmen's Bureau

On March 4, 1865, the U.S. government created a temporary federal agency - the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands- to assist 4 million freed slaves in making the transition from slavery to freedom. The agency distributed trainloads of food and clothing provided by the federal government to freed slaves and Southern white refugees. They built hospitals for the freed slaves and gave direct medical aid to more than one million of them. The greatest successes of the Freedmen's Bureau were in the field of education. More than 1,000 Negro schools were built and staffed with qualified instructors. Most of the major Negro colleges in the United States were founded with the assistance of the Bureau. But the Freedmen's Bureau was far more than a welfare agency. Government employees helped former slaves find jobs, negotiated terms of labor contracts, and investigated claims of unfair treatment. White Southerners were generally hostile toward the bureau and its activities and in the postwar South the Freedmen's Bureau became the only guardian of civil rights the former slaves could turn to. Some blacks were settled on public lands under the Homestead Act of 1862 but the bureau's hopes of massive land redistribution in the South did not materialize, thwarted by President Andrew Johnson's restoration of abandoned lands pardoned Southerners. Without land, the freed blacks had little choice but to participate in sharecropping arrangements that inevitably became oppressive. Maj. Gen. Oliver O. Howard was appointed to head the agency. Though his personal integrity was never questioned, Howard's agency was riddled with corruption, inefficiency, and charges of misappropriation of funds. The agency also became the pawn of the corrupt Radical Republican government and was used to help maintain Republican control of the states occupied by federal troops. Congress discontinued the Freedmen's Bureau in 1872.