Government Politics | Social Support

The Freedmen's Bureau

Credit: Stock Montage/Archive Photos/Getty Images
In five tumultuous years, the Freedmen's Bureau was shut down and left the South. African Americans lost most of the rights they'd temporarily gained and the Freedmen's Bureau protected, including the right to vote.
In 1865, the Freedmen's Bureau opened offices across the American South, charged with the mission of incorporating formerly enslaved African Americans into free society.

After the American Civil War, the U.S. government established the Freedmen's Bureau to assist the South in transitioning to a free society. In 1865, offices were established across the South aiding in feeding, housing, educating, and empowering freed African Americans. Despite being underfunded and understaffed, the bureau negotiated fair labor contracts, legalized marriages, and built thousands of schools and colleges where millions of African Americans learned to read and write. However, Southern whites violently resisted the changes through terrorism and institutional discrimination-vigilante groups and the Black Codes, a series of laws limiting African Americans' rights-proved a fatal blow. Lacking the military might to defend itself and African Americans, the bureau was dissolved by 1870, leaving millions of African Americans to fend for themselves in a brand new society that feared their freedom.

Credit: Hulton Archive/Archive Photos/Getty Images
With no money or job opportunities, many African Americans returned to the plantation to become sharecroppers, an exploitative tenant farming system that left them perpetually in debt.

 

Credit: Buyenlarge/Archive Photos/Getty Images
The longest-lasting legacy of the Freedmen's Bureau was improving African American access to education. The agency temporarily created more than 1,000 schools, training programs, and colleges, including Howard University, named for the bureau's first commissioner, Oliver Otis Howard.

 

Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain
Early on, the agency controlled some confiscated lands of former Confederates, which it sold cheaply to African Americans. However, just months later, U.S. President Andrew Johnson returned this land to its former Confederate owners.

 

Credit: Buyenlarge/Archive Photos/Getty Images
After the Freedmen's Bureau left the South, African Americans were helpless against the Black Codes, strict anti-vagrancy laws that punished the homeless. Local governments were allowed to imprison African Americans and force them to perform labor against their will.