A History of the Freedmen's Bureau

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The Civil War was a messy and brutal conflict for the United States, with slavery being the primary factor for the battle. In the beginning of the war there were about four million slaves in the Union. With the help of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, these Union slaves were declared free from slavery. However, because so many of these slaves were living in Confederacy territories they did not actually experience freedom until the end of the war. Lincoln tried very hard to abolish slavery, but it seems that he did not fully think through what would happen to these slaves after the war ended. In 1865 the Union created the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands to help the men and women after the war. This came to be recognized as the Freedmen’s Bureau, and was used to help slaves transition to freedom. Unfortunately, not all of its goals were accomplished.
Abraham Lincoln’s resistance to expand slavery into the West created a long period of conflict that led up to the civil war. After Lincoln won the 1860 election, the official conflict was soon to begin. Before President Lincoln could even give his inaugural address seven states from the south declared their independence from the Union, and on March 4, 1861 The Confederate States of America was formed. When the Confederate army fired on Fort Sumter April 12, 1861 the American Civil War had begun. By the end of the civil war four more states would come to unite with the Confederacy, and more than six hundred thousand men would die on either side.
At the beginning of the war about four million slaves occupied the United States. Most of these slaves labored on farms in the Confederacy. Depending on the masters, slaves were treated different. The fortunate ones w...

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McPherson, James M. Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1990.
Morris, Thomas D. Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619-1860. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1996.
Nichols, Roy F. The Disruption of American Democracy. New York: Macmillan Co, 1948.
“Palm Sunday,” Harpers Weekly. April 22, 1865.

Parker, Marjorie H. 1954. "Some Educational Activities of the Freedmen's Bureau.” The Journal of Negro Education. 23:1 (Winter, 1954): 9-21.
Paskoff, Paul F. "Measures of War: A Quantitative Examination of the Civil War's
Destructiveness in the Confederacy.” Civil War History 54:1 (March, 2008): 35-62.
Randall, J. G., and David Herbert Donald. The Civil War and Reconstruction. Boston: Heath,
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