The Freedmen’s Bureau

During the war, Union commanders and Treasury officials handled the needs of refugees and freedpeople and the management of abandoned and confiscated land. Congress consolidated those duties on March 3, 1865, creating the Bureau in the War Department. In May, President Andrew Johnson appointed Maj. Gen. Oliver Otis Howard as commissioner, with assistant commissioners in each Southern state.

The Bureau’s mission was to provide relief and help freedpeople become self-sufficient. It issued rations and clothing, operated hospitals and refugee camps, supervised labor contracts between planters and freedpeople, handled complaints and apprenticeship disputes, assisted benevolent societies in founding schools, helped legalize marriages entered into during slavery, and provided transportation to people trying to reunite with family or relocate. Later it also helped Black veterans obtain back pay and bounties.

Congress passed a new Freedmen’s Bureau bill in 1866 in the face of President Johnson’s opposition; Johnson had allowed Southern states to pass black codes that essentially maintained slavery under another name. Most of the Bureau’s work ended by December 1868, and it was abolished in 1872. Its records — letters, labor contracts, marriage registers, and school reports — are now among the richest sources on the lives of African Americans in the first years of freedom.