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date: 08 February 2025

The Freedmen’s Bureaulocked

The Freedmen’s Bureaulocked

  • Joseph P. ReidyJoseph P. ReidyHoward University

Summary

On March 3, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln signed into law a bill creating the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, better known as the Freedmen’s Bureau. Congress granted the bureau control over affairs relating to the formerly enslaved people in the Confederate States and also charged it with administering relief to war refugees and managing the confiscated and abandoned land in federal possession. In theory, its agents would transform the habits and beliefs associated with slavery into those that prevailed in the free states of the North. Practical challenges abounded, and the original view that the intervention would be brief proved to be naïve. Complicating matters, Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, viewed the bureau as a bone of contention in his dispute with Congressional Republicans over which branch of government would control Reconstruction, the process of returning the seceded states to full standing in national affairs. Overriding Johnson’s vetoes, Congress extended the bureau’s mandate, first to 1868 and eventually to 1872. From the beginning, Southern critics accused the bureau of creating labor strife and stirring hatred between the races, a characterization that formed a central plank in later Lost Cause mythology regarding the evils of Reconstruction. Only decades into the 20th century did historians succeed in rehabilitating the reputation of this pioneering federal agency and its important contributions to restoring stability to the Southern economy and assisting formerly enslaved Southerners in asserting their rights as free and equal citizens of the republic.

Subjects

  • Civil War and Reconstruction
  • Slavery and Abolition
  • Political History
  • Labor and Working Class History
  • African American History
  • Southern History

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