SHORT STORY : THE FREEDMEN ‘S BUREAU

In the years following the Civil War, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned

Lands (the Freedmen's Bureau) provided assistance to tens of thousands of former slaves and impoverished whites in the Southern States and the District of Columbia. The war had liberated nearly four million slaves and destroyed the region's cities, towns, and plantation-based economy. It left former slaves and many whites dislocated from their homes, facing starvation, and owning only the clothes they wore. The need for assistance was very desperate as thousands of black and white southerners endured extreme hardship in the months following the end of the war. The challenge of establishing a new social order founded on freedom and racial equality was enormous.

The Bureau was established in the War Department in 1865 to undertake the relief effort and the unprecedented social reconstruction that would bring freed people to full citizenship. It was supposed to be a temporary agency, under the “guidance” of the U.S Army and General Oliver O. Howard, which issued food and clothing, operated hospitals and temporary camps, helped locate family members, promoted education, helped freedmen legalize marriages, provided employment, supervised labor contracts, provided legal representation, investigated racial confrontations, settled freedmen on abandoned or confiscated lands, and worked with African American soldiers and sailors and their heirs to secure back pay, bounty payments, and pensions. The Bureau also had the huge task of helping southern blacks and whites make the transition from society based slavery to one allowing freedom in every sense of the word. They had the backing of the Northerners who influenced Congress help to re...

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...osts of the Freedmen's Bureau, amounting to $17 million, through a direct tax on cotton and on commercial transactions that brought $68 million into the national treasury by 1869.

Contributions from northern church and charitable organizations supplemented and later replaced the bureau's relief work. The Peabody Education Fund, endowed in 1867 by the Massachusetts born merchant and banker George Peabody, promoted public education in the South; it was both a pioneer in educational philanthropy and a forerunner of the modern philanthropic foundation.

The bureau achieved its greatest success in education. Institutions established with bureau assistance included Howard University, Hampton Institute, and Fisk and Atlanta universities. It counted as its greatest failure its land distribution program, which caused much confusion and disappointment among the blacks.