Johnson was actively hostile to the Freedmen’s Bureau. Congress had established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands on March 3, 1865, before Lincoln’s assassination. In creating the bureau, Congress gave new power to the federal government, which it would do repeatedly. More unusually, it created and staffed an agency designed to execute that power. It was, to be sure, a temporary agency, expiring a year after the Confederacy expired, but until then the Freedmen’s Bureau had the authority to govern “all subjects relating to refugees and freedmen from the rebel states.”
