The act establishing the Freedmen’s Bureau began life in March of 1864, as a bill in Congress to establish a Bureau of Freedmen in the War Department. Debate in Congress swirled for a year, with a plan for a permanent Bureau scuttled as too radical. Finally, in March of 1865, Congress passed the following act, establishing a temporary agency with a general mandate to aid the freedpeople.

An Act to establish a Bureau for the Relief of Freedmen and Refugees.

Be it enacted . . . That there is hereby established in the War Department, to continue during the present war of rebellion, and for one year thereafter, a bureau of refugees, freedmen, and abandoned lands, to which shall be committed, as hereinafter provided, the supervision and management of all abandoned lands, and the control of all subjects relating to refugees and freedmen from rebel states. . . .

The Secretary of War may 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, under such rules and regulations as he may direct.

The commissioner, under the direction of the President, shall have authority to set apart, for the use of loyal refugees and freedmen, such tracts of land within the insurrectionary states as shall have been abandoned, or to which the United States shall have acquired title by confiscation or sale, or otherwise, and to every male citizen, whether refugee or freedman, as aforesaid, there shall be assigned not more than forty acres of such land, and the person to whom it was so assigned shall be protected in the use and enjoyment of the land for the term of three years. . . . At the end of said term, or at any time during said term, the occupants of any parcels so assigned may purchase the land and receive such title thereto as the United States can convey, upon paying therefor the value of the land, as ascertained and fixed for the purpose of determining the annual rent aforesaid.

APPROVED, March 3, 1865.

Source: U.S., Statutes at Large, Treaties, and Proclamations of the United States of America, vol. 13 (Boston, 1866),  507-9.

Document 4.9.3: Excerpts from The First Freedman’s Bureau Act, 1865.

General Oliver Otis Howard, head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, sent the following instructions to his Assistant Commissioners in the South during the summer of 1865, just as the war was ending. These regulations directed the work of Bureau agents throughout the South, though there was no guarantee that individual agents would follow them to the letter. Just as important as revealing the intended work of agents, the document illustrates the principles underlying the Bureau’s efforts: racial justice, economic liberalism, and a swift end to government support.

Relief establishments will be discontinued as speedily as the cessation of hostilities and the return of industrial pursuits will permit. Great discrimination will be observed in administering relief, so as to include none that are not absolutely necessitous and destitute. Every effort will be made to render the people self-supporting. Government supplies will only be temporarily issued to enable destitute persons speedily to support themselves. . . .

In all places where there is an interruption of civil war, . . . the control of all subjects relating to refugees and freedmen being committed to this bureau, the Assistant Commissioners will adjudicate . . . all difficulties arising between negroes themselves, or between negroes and whites or Indians. . . .

Negroes must be free to choose their own employers, and be paid for their labor.  Agreements should be free, bona fide acts, approved by proper officers, and their inviolability enforced on both parties. The old system of overseers, tending to compulsory unpaid labor and acts of cruelty and oppression is prohibited.

Source: House Ex. Doc., no. 11, 39 Cong., 1 Sess., p. 45.  In Walter Fleming, ed. Documentary History of Reconstruction (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1906), I, 328-30.

Document 4.9.5: Excerpts from “Rules and Regulations for Assistant Commissioners,” 1865

This contract represents a typical arrangement between Black laborers and a White planter during the early years of Reconstruction. In it, the workers are paid wages, rather than with the proceeds of a share of the crop. The Freedmen’s Bureau agent who oversaw the negotiation of this contract likely helped the freedpeople earn more in wages than they would have without his help.

Bureau R. F. & A. L.

Office Asst. Comr. State Office

Augusta, Ga.

March 13, 1866 

State of Georgia

Wilkes County 

This agreement entered into this the 9th day of January 1866 between Clark Anderson & Co. of the State of Mississippi, County of (blank) of the first part and the Freedmen whose names are annexed of the State and County aforesaid of the second part. 

Witnesseth that the said Clark Anderson & Co. agrees to furnish to the Freed Laborers whose names are annexed quarters, fuel and healthey rations. Medical attendance and supplies in case of sickness, and the amount set opposite their respective names per month during the continuation of this contract paying one third of the wages each month, and the amount in full at the end of the year before the final disposal of the crop which is to be raised by them on said Clark Anderson & Co. Plantation in the County of (blank) and State aforesaid. The said Clark Anderson & Co. further agree to give the female laborers one half day in each week to do their washing &c. 

The Laborers on their part agree to work faithfully and diligently on the Plantation of the said Clark Anderson & Co. for six days in the week and to do all necessary work usually done on a plantation on the Sabbath, . . . that we will be respectful and obedient to said Clark Anderson & Co. or their agents, and that we will in all respects endeavor to promote their interests, and we further bind ourselves to treat with humanity and kindness the stock entrusted to our care and will be responsible for such stock as die through our inhumanity or carelessness and we further agree to deduct for time lost by our own fault one dollar per day during the Spring and two dollars during cotton picking season, also that the Father & Mother should pay for board of children, also for lost time by protracted sickness and we further agree to have deducted from our respective wages the expense of medical attendance and supplies during sickness. 

The names of 169 workers follow, including 56 adult men, 44 adult women, 61 children, and 8 hands listed as “unserviceable” (due to pregnancy or illness). The list includes the name, age, and wages due (from $5-$15) each worker.

Source: Records of the Assistant Commissioner for the State of Georgia, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, 1865 _ 1869, National Archives Publication M798 Roll 36, "Unbound Miscellaneous Papers."

Document 4.9.6: A Bureau Contract, 1866

Claude G. Bowers (1878–1958) was a writer, editor, and newspaper man from Indiana. He wrote popular history, producing best-sellers on the Founding Fathers. In 1929, he took on the history of Reconstruction, an effort which resulted in The Tragic Era. The book reflected two important currents of the day. The first was Populism, a political movement of the late nineteenth century which sought to empower farmers and working-class White people. The other was White supremacy. Bowers’s interpretation of Reconstruction recapitulated the commonly-held wisdom of the day – that Reconstruction had been a scandalous experiment during which Radical Republicans sought to circumvent democracy, and solidify their political hold over the nation by enfranchising Black people and using them as their puppets.  

Meanwhile[, in spring of 1866] the Senate was brilliantly debating Trumbull’s bill continuing the Freedmen’s Bureau indefinitely, extending its operations to freedmen everywhere, authorizing the allotment of forty-acre tracts of the unoccupied lands of the South to negroes, and arming the Bureau with judicial powers to be exercised at will. Trumbull and Fessenden bore the brunt of the defense, and Hendricks, leading the attack, assailed the judicial feature, the extension of the Bureau’s power throughout the country, and the creation of an army of petty officials. “Let the friends of the negroes be satisfied to treat them as they are treated in Pennsylvania . . . in Ohio . . . everywhere where people have maintained their sanity upon the question,’ said Cowan of Pennsylvania.

With some moved by a sincere interest in the freedmen’s welfare, the average politician was thinking of the tremendous engine for party in the multitude of paid petty officials swarming over the South, for its possibilities had been tested. It was a party measure, and as such it was passed.

While still pending in Congress, the bill had been carefully studied in Administration circles and found “a terrific engine . . . a governmental monstrosity.” Such was the opinion of [President Andrew] Johnson, who calmly prepared to meet it with a veto. . . . In tense excitement, and a little dazed, the Senate sat listening to the Message. Merciless in its reasoning, simply phrased, there was no misunderstanding its meaning.  

The Bureau’s life had not expired; why pass the bill at all? it asked. And no juries in times of peace! No indictment required! No penalty stipulated beyond the will of members of the court-martial! No appeal! No write of error in any court! “I cannot reconcile a system of military jurisdiction of this kind with the Constitution,” said the President.

Where in the Constitution is authority to expend public funds to aid indigent people? Where the right to take the white man’s land and give it to others without “due process of law”? More: the granting of so much power over so many people through so many agents would enable the President, “If so disposed, to control the action of this numerous class and use them for attainment of his own political ends.” The Message closed with the Johnsonian proposition that with eleven States excluded from Congress, the bill involved “taxation without representation.”

The next day . . . the vote was taken, and the veto sustained. A prolonged hissing in the colored galleries, some cheers in the others, and the visitors were expelled. . . .But great crows with a band of music celebrated in front of the Willard, listening to the orators praising Johnson, and the “New York Tribune” declared that “the copperheads at their homes were firing guns in honor of the presidential veto.” . . .

The day after the failure of the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill, a new measure was introduced. . . .  The second Freedmen’s Bureau Bill was pushed to passage, and Johnson returned it with a veto more powerful than the first.  Many Republicans were sadly shaken, and it required vigorous application of the party’s whip to force them into line, but they yielded, and the measure passed over the veto. . . .

Left to themselves, the negroes would have turned for leadership to the native whites, who understood them best. This [to the Radicals] was the danger. Imperative, then, that they should be taught to hate — and teachers of hate were plentiful. Many of these were found among the agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and these, paid by the Government, were devoting themselves assiduously to party organization on government time.  

Over the plantations these agents wandered, seeking the negroes in their cabins, and halting them at their labors in the fields, and the simple-minded freedmen were easy victims of their guile. One of the State Commissioners of the Bureau assembled a few blacks behind closed doors in a negro’s hut, and in his official capacity informed them that the Government required their enrollment in political clubs. Thus the Bureau agents did not scruple to employ coercion.

Source: Claude G. Bowers, The Tragic Era: The Revolution after Lincoln (Cambridge, MA: Riverside, 1929), 101-3, 115, 198. (Item 4.9.B)

William Edward Burghardt DuBois was born in 1868 Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He attended college at Fisk in Nashville, Tennessee, before moving on to Harvard, where he earned a master’s degree, and the University of Berlin, where he garnered a doctorate. In his day, he was the most important student of the “race problem,” and he wrote about it all his life. He first burst onto the American literary scene with this essay in The Atlantic from 1901, during which he sought to resurrect the reputation of the Freedmen’s Bureau. He followed up this effort with The Souls of Black Folk and the monumental Black Reconstruction. Throughout his life he was active in a wide variety of political efforts to redress the race problem, from pan-Africanism, to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, to the Communist Party. Still, his efforts to reconstruct Black history proved the major component of his life’s work, and the most important of his many legacies.

No sooner had Northern armies touched Southern soil than this old question, newly guised, sprang from the earth,—What shall be done with slaves? . . . At last there arose in the South a government of men called the Freedmen's Bureau, which lasted, legally, from 1865 to 1872, but in a sense from 1861 to 1876, and which sought to settle the Negro problems in the United States of America. . . .

Thus did the United States government definitely assume charge of the emancipated Negro as the ward of the nation. It was a tremendous undertaking. Here, at a stroke of the pen, was erected a government of millions of men,—and not ordinary men, either, but black men emasculated by a peculiarly complete system of slavery, centuries old; and now, suddenly, violently, they come into a new birthright, at a time of war and passion, in the midst of the stricken, embittered population of their former masters. . . .

The very name of the Bureau stood for a thing in the South which for two centuries and better men had refused even to argue,—that life amid free Negroes was simply unthinkable, the maddest of experiments. The agents which the Bureau could command varied all the way from unselfish philanthropists to narrow-minded busybodies and thieves; and even though it be true that the average was far better than the worst, it was the one fly that helped to spoil the ointment. . . .

So the cleft between the white and black South grew. Idle to say it never should have been; it was as inevitable as its results were pitiable. Curiously incongruous elements were left arrayed against each other: the North, the government, the carpetbagger, and the slave, here; and there, all the South that was white, whether gentleman or vagabond, honest man or rascal, lawless murderer or martyr to duty. . . . 

Such was the work of the Freedmen's Bureau. To sum it up in brief, we may say: it set going a system of free labor; it established the black peasant proprietor; it secured the recognition of black freemen before courts of law; it founded the free public school in the South. On the other hand, it failed to establish good will between ex-masters and freedmen; to guard its work wholly from paternalistic methods that discouraged self-reliance; to make Negroes landholders in any considerable numbers. Its successes were the result of hard work, supplemented by the aid of philanthropists and the eager striving of black men. Its failures were the result of bad local agents, inherent difficulties of the work, and national neglect. . . .

Such an institution, from its wide powers, great responsibilities, large control of moneys, and generally conspicuous position, was naturally open to repeated and bitter attacks. . . . The most bitter attacks on the Freedmen's Bureau were aimed not so much at its conduct or policy under the law as at the necessity for any such organization at all. . . .   

That such an institution was unthinkable in 1870 was due in part to certain acts of the Freedmen's Bureau itself. It came to regard its work as merely temporary, and Negro suffrage as a final answer to all present perplexities. The political ambition of many of its agents and proteges led it far afield into questionable activities, until the South, nursing its own deep prejudices, came easily to ignore all the good deeds of the Bureau, and hate its very name with perfect hatred. So the Freedmen's Bureau died, and its child was the Fifteenth Amendment.   

The passing of a great human institution before its work is done, like the untimely passing of a single soul, but leaves a legacy of striving for other men. . . . For this much all men know: despite compromise, struggle, war, and struggle, the Negro is not free. . . . In the most cultured sections and cities of the South the Negroes are a segregated servile caste, with restricted rights and privileges. Before the courts, both in law and custom, they stand on a different and peculiar basis. Taxation without representation is the rule of their political life. And the result of all this is, and in nature must have been, lawlessness and crime. That is the large legacy of the Freedmen's Bureau, the work it did not do because it could not. 

Source: W. E. B. DuBois, “The Freedmen's Bureau,” Atlantic Monthly 87 (1901), 354-65. (Item 4.9.C)

J.D.B. De Bow was a wealthy and prominent southerner who lived through the Civil War years. He published DeBow’s Review, an influential journal, out of New Orleans, Louisiana. DeBow’s Review offered a conservative slant on the problems of Reconstruction, often echoing the paternalism of the southern White elite. DeBow offered the following testimony before Congress in 1866.

I think if the whole regulation of the negroes, or freedmen, were left to the people of the communities in which they live, it will be administered for the best interest of the negroes as well as of the white men. I think there is a kindly feeling on the part of the planters towards the freedmen. They are not held at all responsible for anything that has happened. They are looked upon as the innocent cause.

In talking with a number of planters, I remember some of them telling me they were succeeding very well with their freedmen, having got a preacher to preach to them and a teacher to teach them, believing it was for the interest of the planter to make the negro feel reconciled; for, to lose his services as a laborer for even a few months would be very disastrous. The sentiment prevailing is, that it is for the interest of the employer to teach the negro, to educate his children, to provide a preacher for him, and to attend to his physical wants. . . .

The Freedmen’s Bureau, or any agency to interfere between the freedman and his former master, is only productive of mischief. There are constant appeals from one to the other and continual annoyances. It has a tendency to create dissatisfaction and disaffection on the part of the laborer, and is in every respect in its result most unfavorable to the system of industry that is now being organized under the new order of things in the South.

Source: Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, part iv, p. 134. (Document 4.9.7)

A Confederate cavalry officer and later general, Wade Hampton (1818-1902) was one of South Carolina’s most prominent planters.  He ran for Governor of South Carolina and lost a close election to James Lawrence Orr in 1865.  At the end of the Radical phase of Reconstruction, in 1876, he ran again as a Democrat, against incumbent Republican Daniel Chamberlain. The election was so close that South Carolina had two governors for a short time, until President Ulysses S. Grant withdrew Federal troops from South Carolina, thus conceding the election to Hampton, and ending Reconstruction in South Carolina. Hampton prepared the following report of conditions in the South for President Andrew Johnson in 1866.

The strong but paternal hand which had controlled him [i.e., “the negro”] through centuries of slavery, having been suddenly and rudely withdrawn, the only hope of rendering him either useful, industrious or harmless, was to elevate him in the scale of civilization, and to make him appreciate not only the blessings, but the duties of freedom. This was the prevalent . . . sentiment of the South. . . .

That much more had not been done to carry this sentiment into effect is due solely to the pernicious and mischievous inference of that most vicious institution, the Freedmen’s Bureau. . . . The whole machinery of this bureau has been used by the basest men, for the purpose of swindling the negro, plundering the white man and defrauding the Government.

There may be an honest man connected with the Bureau, but I fear that the commissioners sent by your Excellency to probe the rottenness of this cancer will find their search for such as fruitless as was that of the Cynic of old. The report of these Commissioners furnishes ample justification for the ill-will, the distrust, and the contempt with which the people of the South regard this baleful and pernicious institution.

Source: Wade Hampton to Andrew Johnson, 1866, in Walter Fleming, ed. Documentary History of Reconstruction (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1906), I, 368-69. (Document 4.9.8)

In 1871, Congress began an intensive investigation into the activities of the Ku Klux Klan throughout the South. Concerned that the Klan was denying freedpeople their civil rights, Republicans in Congress heard testimony from hundreds of southerners, White and Black, conservative and radical.  The resulting transcripts offer a wealth of information on southern life during the Reconstruction. The following testimony of an Alabama planter named Daniel Taylor offers insights into the ways the Freedmen’s Bureau was perceived by many southern White planters.

The negroes that would go and settle down on plantations and work and stay there always had plenty to eat. The white men who employed them felt bound to keep them in plenty to eat and good clothes to wear when they would stay with them.

But if a man was trying to make a negro work, and talked a little short to the negro, he [the negro] would pick up and go somewhere else. . . . The negroes would quit and go off for this Bureau when they should have had a dependence in the country. They depended upon the Bureau for their rations. . . .

The negroes cheated the farmers out of their labor. . . . The negroes were to pay for their provisions out of their part of the crop and they did not go on making their crop, so that their part of the crop was not sufficient to pay the owner the amount that was due him for the land and stock and the advance.

Source: Ku Klux Klan Report, Alabama Testimony (1871), 1132. (Document 4.9.9)

General Ulysses S. Grant commanded all Union armies at the end of the Civil War. In November of 1865, President Andrew Johnson sent Grant on a tour throughout the South to observe conditions. In December, Grant sent his report to Johnson. A military man with few clear political sentiments, Grant steered toward a moderate-conservative position on the reconstruction of the South. In general, he told Johnson what he wanted to hear – that white southerners were accepting defeat and emancipation gracefully. This notion, while not generally true, buttressed Johnson’s policy of quick reconciliation with the former Confederates, and undermined the Radicals’ calls for continued intervention – militarily and otherwise – into southern affairs. As far as the freedpeople went, Grant believed white southerners were their best and natural “friends,” on whom they should first rely. He thus reflected a paternalism he shared with southern conservatives and some northern moderates alike.

In some of the States its [i.e., the Freedmen’s Bureau’s] affairs have not been conducted with good judgment or economy, and that the belief, widely spread among the freedmen of the Southern States, that the lands of their former owners will, at least in part, be divided among them, has come from the agents of this bureau. This belief is seriously interfering with the willingness of the freedmen to make contracts for the coming year. In some form the Freedmen’s Bureau is an absolute necessity until civil law is established and enforced, securing to the freedmen their rights and full protection. . . .

Many, perhaps a majority, of the agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau advise the freedmen that by their own industry they must expect to live. To this end they endeavor to secure employment for them, and to see that both contracting parties comply with their engagements. In some instances, I am sorry to say, the freedman’s mind does not seem to be disabused of the idea that a freedman has the right to live without care or provision for the future.  

The effect of the belief in division of lands is idleness and accumulation in camps, towns, and cities. In such cases I think it will be found that vice and disease will tend to the extermination, or great reduction of the colored race.  

It cannot be expected that the opinions held by men at the South for years can be changed in a day; and therefore the freedmen require for a few years not only laws to protect them, but the fostering care of those who will give them good counsel, and in whom they can rely.

Source: Senate Ex. Doc. No. 2, 30 Cong., 1 Sess., 117. (Document 4.9.11)

The following testimony, by General John Tarbell of the Union army, illustrates the moderate position on the Freedmen’s Bureau.  

I think they [the planters] have well grounded complaints against the Freedmen’s Bureau; and I do not think their criticism upon that bureau are in every instance dictated by motives of disloyalty. I do not mean to say what proportion of the officers of that bureau are incompetent or corrupt, but that there are many such I have no doubt. In such districts there has been a good deal of complaint, and to a casual observer their comments might be ascribed, perhaps, to motives of disloyalty; but a more careful attention to the subject satisfied me that their complaints were well grounded in a great many cases, for in districts where they had upright, intelligent, and impartial officers of the bureau, the people expressed entire satisfaction. They stated to me that where they had such officers, and where they had soldiers who were under good discipline, they were entirely welcome, and indeed they were glad to have their presence – in some cases approving the action of the bureau officers in punishing white men for the ill treatment of colored people, saying that the officers were perfectly right.

In other districts, I am satisfied that it often occurred that bureau officers, wanting in good sense, would show a decided partiality for the colored people, without regard to justice. I am satisfied, also, there were districts where the planters would insure the favor of the bureau officers to them by paying them money; and while they were glad to have their favor, still they would condemn such officers, and in such districts there was dissatisfaction.

Source:  Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction of the First Session Thirty-Ninth Congress, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1866, Georgia – Alabama – Mississippi –  Arkansas, pages 155-157. (Document 4.9.12)

Born near Cologne, Germany, in 1829, Carl Schurz emigrated to Wisconsin in 1852, where he began a career as a lawyer and politician. He rose rapidly in the Republican Party, eventually supporting Abraham Lincoln’s Presidential bid in 1860. He was rewarded by being named minister to Spain, a position he left to fight in the Civil War. Lincoln made him a general, and Schurz repaid him by assisting him in his re-election campaign of 1864. After the war, President Andrew Johnson recognized Schurz’s political contributions as a moderate Republican, naming him a Special Commissioner to oversee conditions in the Gulf states. Schurz filed the following report in this capacity.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

While the Southern people are always ready to expatiate upon the shortcomings of the Freedmen’s Bureau, they are not so ready to recognize the services it has rendered. I feel warranted in saying that not one-half of the labor that has been done in the South this year or will be done there next year, would have been or would be done but for the exertions of the Freedmen’s Bureau. The confusion and disorder of the transition period would have been infinitely greater had not an agency interfered which possessed the confidence of the emancipated slaves; which could disabuse them of any extravagant notions and expectations and be trusted; which could administer to them good advice and be voluntarily obeyed.  

No other agency, except one placed there by the national government, could have wielded that moral power whose interposition was so necessary to prevent the southern society from falling at once into the chaos of a general collision between its different elements.  

That the success achieved by the Freedmen’s Bureau is as yet very incomplete cannot be disputed. A more perfect organization and a more carefully selected personnel may be desirable; but it is doubtful whether a more suitable machinery can be devised to secure to free labor in the South that protection against disturbing influences which the nature of the situation still imperatively demands.

Source: Senate Ex. Doc., no. 2, 39 Cong., 1 Sess, 40. (Document 4.9.13)

T.W. Conway was a chaplain in the Union Army, who served as head of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Louisiana. His tenure was not successful, and he was eventually removed. He began touring the North, speaking on the importance of the Bureau for southern blacks. This passage is taken from his testimony to Congress.

I should expect in Louisiana, as in the whole southern country, that the withdrawal of the Freedmens Bureau would be followed by a condition of anarchy and bloodshed. . .  I am pained at the conviction that I have in my own mind that if the Freedmen’s Bureau is withdrawn the result will be fearful in the extreme.

What it has already done and is now doing in shielding these people, only incites the bitterness of their foes. They will be murdered by wholesale, and they in their turn will defend themselves. It will not be persecution merely; it will be slaughter; and I doubt whether the world has ever known the like.

These southern rebels, when the power is once in their hands, will stop at nothing short of extermination. Governor Wells himself told me that he expected in ten years to see the whole colored race exterminated, and that conviction is shared very largely among the white people of the south. It has been threatened by leading men there that they would exterminate the freedmen. . . . The wicked work has already commenced, and it could be shown that the policy pursued by the government is construed by the rebels as not being opposed to it.

Source: Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, part iv, 82. (Document 4.9.14)

Sidney Andrews was a newspaper correspondent sympathetic with the plight of the freedpeople.  In 1866, he published The South Since the War, an important commentary documenting his travels through the war-torn South.  This passage from that book was read into a Congressional committee report in 1871.

Of the thousand things that the bureau has done no balance sheet can ever be made. How it helped the ministers of the church, saved the blacks from robbery and persecution, enforced respect for the negro’s rights, instructed all the people in the meaning of the law, . . . brought about amicable relations between employer and employed, corrected bad habits among white and blacks, restored order, sustained contracts for work, compelled attention to the statute books, . . . furthered local educational movements, . . . dignified labor, . . . rooted out old prejudices, . . . assisted the freemen to become land-owners, . . . set idlers at work, . . . carried the light of the North into the dark places of the South, steadied the negro in his struggle with novel ideas, . . . checked the passion of the whites and blacks, . . . assisted in creating a sentiment of nationality — how it did all this and a hundred-fold more, who shall ever tell?  What pen shall ever record? . . .

Success! The world can point to nothing like it in all the history of emancipation. No thirteen millions of dollars were ever more wisely spent; yet, from the beginning of this scheme has encountered the bitterest opposition and the most unrelenting hate. Scoffed at like a thing of shame, often struck and sorely wounded, sometimes in the house of its friends, apologized for rather than defended; yet with God on its side, the Freedmen’s Bureau has triumphed; civilization has received a new impulse, and the friends of humanity may well rejoice.

The bureau work is being rapidly brought to a close, and its accomplishments will enter into history, while the unfounded accusations brought against it will be forgotten. There is a day and hour when slander lives not. When the passions of men subside, and when the dust of time has well fallen, then comes the hour of calmer judgement. Many-tongued scandal has the briefest of existence. . . . Evil is quickly forgotten; truth alone is abiding.

Source: House Report no 121, 41 Cong., 2 Sess., (1871), p. 20. (Document 4.9.15)

Excerpts from The Second Freedman’s Bureau Act, 1866

It was a provision of the original act establishing the Freedmen’s Bureau that Congress would have to renew the agency for it to continue functioning. By spring of 1866 it was clear that much work remained to be done. The transition to free labor had just begun, and an economic downturn was making the shift all the more challenging. In this climate, Congress began debating the provisions under which the Freedmen’s Bureau Act would be renewed. Radical Republicans in Congress sought to enlarge its powers considerably. Their proposal called for making the Bureau a permanent fixture, strengthening its system of independent courts, and providing for liberal homesteading by blacks – the oft-cited promise of “forty acres and a mule.” To the shock of Congress, the conservative President Andrew Johnson vetoed the bill, thus causing dissent among Congressional Republicans and widening the already-present breach between Johnson and Congress. The Republicans went back to the drawing board and recrafted the bill. The Bureau’s life was extended for three years, and the homesteading provisions were removed. This revised  version of the bill passed over Johnson’s veto on July 16.

The act to establish a Bureau for the relief of Freedmen and Refugees . . . shall continue in force for the term of two years from and after the passage of this act. . . .

The Secretary of War [may] issue such medical stores or other supplies and transportation and afford such medical or other aid as may be needful . . . Provided, that no person shall be deemed “destitute,” “suffering,” or “dependent upon the Government for support,” within the meaning of this act, who is able to find employment, and could, by proper industry and exertion, avoid such destitution, suffering, or dependency. . . .

The sales made to “heads of families of the African race,” under the instructions of President Lincoln . . . are hereby confirmed and established; and all leases which have been made to such “heads of families” . . . shall be changed into certificates of sale. . . .  

The [Freedmen’s Bureau] Commissioner shall have power to seize, hold, use, lease, or sell all buildings . . . formerly held under color of title by the late so-called Confederate States, and not heretofore disposed of by the United States, . . . and to use the same or appropriate the proceeds derived therefrom to the education of the freed people. . . .

In every State or district when the ordinary course of judicial proceedings has been interrupted by the rebellion, . . . the right to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, and give evidence, to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property, and to have full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings concerning personal liberty, personal security, and the acquisition, enjoyment, and disposition of estate, real and personal, including the constitutional right to bear arms, shall be secured to and enjoyed by all the citizens of such State or district without respect to race or color, or previous condition of slavery. . . .

Source: Acts and Resolutions, 39 Cong., 1 Sess., p. 191. (Document 4.9.4)