April 10, 2023: Remembering Reconstruction: The Freedmen’s Bureau

[This week marksthe 150th anniversary of thehorrific Colfax Massacre, one of many such Reconstruction sesquicentennialsover the next decade. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five Reconstructionhistories we need to better remember, leading up to a special weekend post on avital new scholarly book.]

On a major andtelling reason why the Bureau failed, and two lasting legacies nonetheless.

The March 3, 1865 legislationwhich established the federal Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands(better known as the Freedmen’s Bureau)includes a stunning detail that reflects just how ill prepared the nation wasfor the realities of Reconstruction: the Bureau was initially intended to existfor only one year. As a result, when the Congressional Republicans supportingReconstruction passed a bill to renew the Bureau’s charter one year later, inFebruary 1866, PresidentAndrew Johnson vetoed the bill (one more example in the long list of “Whatif Lincoln had lived?” hypotheticals), and over the subsequent few yearsthe Bureau became increasingly under-funded, -staffed, and –supported. By 1869the Bureau was operating only a skeleton staff; by 1872 the Bureau’s director, formerUnion General Oliver Howard, had been transferred to the West to handle NativeAmerican policy, and the Bureau ceased operations entirely. Yet in truth, thisseemingly essential Reconstruction program only experienced one year of fullsupport, a telling representation of how significantly hamstrung Reconstructionefforts were from their very outset.

Despite thosesignificant limitations, however, and despite the intense opposition it facedduring and after 1865-66 from discriminatory BlackCodes, the terrors of the KuKlux Klan, and so many other aspects of postbellum Southern society, theBureau achieved a number of impressive, lasting results. The most prominentsuch effects were those related to education, and they took hold very quicklyand potently: by the end of 1865, nearly 100,000former slaves were enrolled in public schools run by or in conjunction withthe Bureau, and despite all the obstacles confronting those students attendancerates apparently remained steady around 80%. When the post-1866 cuts in fundingand staffing made it nearly impossible to run all these schools (church groupsand other communities fortunately stepped in to keep many running), the Bureaushifted its focus to creatinginstitutions of higher education: nearly 25 such colleges were createdbetween 1865 and 1872, and many of them (such as Howard University, FiskUniversity, and Tougaloo College) remain in service today as historically blackcolleges and universities (HBCUs). In and of themselves those colleges anduniversities represent a potent legacy of the Bureau’s educational efforts.

Far moreintimate and thus more difficult to quantify, but at least as significant, werethe Bureau’s efforts to assist freed people’s families, including working toreunite separate family members and performing marriages. Marriagesduring slavery were neither legal nor binding, and that reality both madefamily reunification that much more difficult and presented a host of otherlegal and social problems in the postbellum world. By not only performingbut legalizing marriages between former slaves, then, the Bureau was ableto fundamentally alter the legal and social as well as familial realities forthese freed men and women, and for their families, descendents, andcommunities. Charles Chesnutt’s stunning short story “TheWife of His Youth” (1898) highlights how complicated but also how crucialwere ideas of marriage and family for those who had experienced the fragilityand absence of those core human experiences under slavery. In helping counterthose horrific past realities and offer freed men and women a much differentset of marital and family possibilities, the Bureau performed both a human andhistorical service whose legacies cannot be overstated.

NextReconstruction remembrance tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do youthink? Other Reconstruction histories you’d highlight?