opened schools and churches. In March 1865, Congress authorized the establishment of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, which provided some aid to newly freed people and impoverished white southerners displaced by the war.32 Most agents working for the Freedmen’s Bureau, as it became known, were white military personnel; how they operated in the field reflected the spectrum of white attitudes toward Black people and emancipation—from progressives who distributed resources generously, to conservatives who were often embittered and withholding.
