The Freedmen's Bureau, officially named the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, was the United States government's attempt to take a timid step into modernity. Indeed, in some ways, the Bureau "did not belong to the America of its day", being an unprecedented attempt to create a Federal agency that would oversee relief and social services to the newly emancipated Black population and the impovishered Southern whites. Counting with neither adequate funding nor manpower, the Bureau and its agents still had the daunting duty of being "diplomat, marriage counselor, educator, supervisor of labor contracts, sheriff, judge, and jury", bringing justice, education, labor and protection to an area plagued by the disasters of war and the bloody legacy of slavery.

Here I talk about the legal justification for the bureau and its origins, even though I focus on the issue of land reform. A summarized version would be that the main aims of the Republicans was to bring Northern-style "free labor" to the South. Free labor did not only entail paying the Freedmen for their work, but it was a complete socio-economic system that had social mobility and equality of chance as its main tenets. For Blacks to become "wards of the state", forever under the protection of the government, would not be just, it would be actively prejudicial because “A man can scarcely be called free who is the recipient of public charity.” The Bureau was conceived as a way to grant Blacks the same opportunities White laborers enjoyed, to protect them from legal abuse and violence, and to offer them a respectable education, health services and a decent living until they were able to work for themselves in equality, the Free market the only judge of their success. A Bureau teacher put it succinctly when she recalled how a Black man told her that Blacks had no chance of success because "the white people’s arms are longer than ours.’" "What we want to do", she wrote, "is lengthen the colored people’s arms till they can reach as far as their old masters.”

But how could this be accomplished? In the aftermath of the Civil War, large areas of the South were devastated. Sherman's march to the sea is a well-known event, and it's true that he and his neckties laid devastation to a large swathe of Georgia, but other areas of the South suffered similarly. Sometimes it was because Yankee commanders on the mold of Sherman did it as part of a campaign of "hard war", such as General Sheridan, who laid waste to the Shenandoah Valley, long Virginia's breadbasket. But the simple if cruel erosion of war also caused great destruction, as roaming armies ate resources like locusts, taking crops and chattel, felling trees, dismantling industry and other things that could serve the military, etc. Even in areas relatively untouched by the war, the demise of slavery, the economic collapse of the Confederacy, and neglect resulted in hard times for Dixie. Even before the end of the war, the poverty and helplessness of the former slaves meant that something had to be done to provide for them.

During the war, the Union Army had taken to put contrabands (emancipated slaves) to work in plantations leased to Northerners or even in their old plantations, as long as the owner swore loyalty to the Union. Cotton and other cash crops were in high demand in Northern factories, and thus they expected to quickly make some money. Following free-labor principles, it was thought that Blacks, now motivated by economic ambition rather than by fear of the leash, would work with greater eagerness, thus increasing the profits of the plantations. Some contrabands were also drafted to work directly for the Army, building fortifications or doing the fatigue work. In any case, the Lincoln administration insisted that they should be treated humanely, and commanders on the field did their best to assure this. For example, John Eaton, appointed as Superintendent of contrabands in the Mississippi Valley by General Grant, tried to provide medicine, education and good wages for the freedmen, who were suffering disease and neglect in the overcrowded Army camps. General Banks in Louisiana too tried to establish a system that would guarantee the "sanctity of the family, education for their children, the end of corporal punishment, and payment of reasonable wages" that Blacks desired.

But Wartime Reconstruction was sorely inadequate to the real necessities of African-Americans. One of the major problems was that, aside from providing assistance to the Freedmen, the military had its own needs and those of the Northern war machine in mind. Long held prejudices did much to undermine the Freedmen as well, as many commanders believed that, left to their own devices, Blacks would not work and would instead turn to a life of crime and license. As a result, the Army often forced freedmen to sign yearly contracts, and it sometimes seemed more interested in maintaining labor "discipline" (a code word for subordination to Whites) rather than upholding the rights of Blacks. New Orleans' Black community, for example, denounced Banks' system as an "oligarchy" that was in effect a form of slavery that kept freedmen “chained to the soil”. Even after the war, Army officials accosted freedmen, sometimes trying to force kids who went to school to go and work on plantations instead.

Once the Bureau took over, it sought to remedy these injustices by creating a true free labor system. But President Johnson made things difficult. By handing power back to the pre-war elites instead of true Unionists, the regimes of Presidential Reconstruction were in direct contradiction to the new South the Bureau was tasked to create. The infamous Black codes required Black people to sign labor contracts with plantations owners, and if they did not, they would be marked as "vagrants" and imprisoned. And prisoners could them be leased to work on plantations. A host of unequal laws tried to take away much of the freedmen's newfound liberty and chance to take part on the free market, prohibiting "enticement", that is, offering Black laborers a better wage, limiting fishing and hunting so that freedmen would be unable to support themselves unless they worked for someone, and denying them equal access to justice. Johnson also purged the Bureau of "abolitionist" officers like Rufus Saxton, men who truly cared for the Freedmen, and replaced them with his supporters - men who clearly would side with Whites in most cases.

The Bureau, though clearly imperfect, did much to help Blacks nonetheless, affording them a modicum of impartiality and protection. For example, when several states created apprenticeship laws that allowed Whites to take Black children and claim their labor, even without the consent of the parents, the Bureau took action to release Blacks from these "contracts". Blacks also preferred the courts the Bureau set up as their best chance for obtaining justice, instead of the state courts that judged them harshly while leaving Whites scott-free. The Bureau also took the initiative, together with the Black community, to create an educative system that would "uplift" the Freedmen and instill Republican values and Free Labor discipline into them. Until Johnson curbed their efforts, the Bureau even attempted to give land to the former slaves, granting them economic independence and freedom from White control. Finally, they offered food rations (sugar, flour and cornmeal, enough for a man to subsist for a week) and created hospitals where Freedmen, forsaken by Southern governments, could obtain medicine and treatment. Altogether, W. E. B. du Bois concludes that "The Freedmen's Bureau was the most extraordinary and far-reaching institution of social uplift that America has ever attempted".

However, in many occasions the Bureau was powerless to interfere. Without the command of large armed forces, and since the troops that were there were often unsympathetic, the Bureau could do little to protect the Freedmen from a large wave of postwar violence. The Bureau, took, lacked funds and manpower, and with an unfriendly President who regarded the Bureau as just a machine of "patronage" and a deeply divided Congress that believed that permanent assistance would be prejudicial to the freedmen in the long term, the Bureau lacked the power and means to bring the freemen the help they truly needed. Free labor precepts, as I already stated, also limited the action of the Bureau. Fearing it would become a "pauperizing agency" and believing that the state governments had to eventually take charge of the freedmen since the Bureau was a temporary body, the Bureau discontinued camps for the homeless and poor, limited aid, and discontinued its rations. Blacks, Bureau agents insisted, had to “feel the spur of necessity, if it be needed to make them self-reliant, industrious and provident.” This belief was not entirely limited to Blacks, for Republicans also stressed self-reliance for the Northern poor, but the Bureau expressed no such sentiments regarding aid to poor Southern Whites, who received from 2 to 4 times as much aid as Blacks received.

The Bureau never quite managed to grant legal equality to Blacks or protect them from White terrorism. But it still offered a chance at impartial judgement and protection from legal inequality, and created a social system that did much to help Blacks and Whites in the post-war South, including health services and an education system that for the first time educated Blacks. Imperfect as it was, the Bureau was still an important social agency that provided much necessary relief for the freedmen.

Sources:

Foner's Reconstruction, Baker, Kelly and Foner's After Slavery, and White's The Republic for which it stands.