Reconstruction Blog

Freedmen’s Bureau Act of 1865

                    On March 3, 1865, the Freedmen’s Bureau Act was approved and signed by President Abraham Lincoln.  The Freedmen’s Bureau Act of 1865 established a Bureau for the relief of freedman, refugees, and abandoned lands.  The Bureau provided; “supervision and management of the abandoned lands; and the control of all subjects relating to refugees and freedmen from rebel states, or from any district of country within the territory embraced in the operations of the army, under such rules and regulations as may be prescribed by the head of the Bureau and approved by the President”.   The Freedmen’s Bureau Act of 1865, directed by Secretary of War, would ensure clothing, fuel, shelter, employment, and supplies for freedmen, refugees and their families.  It further enacted funding for the Bureau.  Furthermore, it enacted the rights of loyal refugees and freedmen, the right to rent abandoned land of no more than forty acres, for a term of three years.  After viewing, the Freedmen’s Bureau Act of 1865, there seem to be several reasons the Bureau failed. 

 

Militarily the Bureau lacked force to back up its authority because most of the soldiers had been sent to the Western frontier.  For example, in the book Redemption, by Nicholas Lemann there are several instances in the coming years that the military force was not present to ensure the safety of the freedmen from the white supremacy.   Governor Albert Ames, of Mississippi, requested military enforcement in Vicksburg but was turned down.  Ames asked President Grant, “can there be any serious objection why troops can not be sent there…Will it not be the best (least?) of evils to have troops there for any emergency”.

Economically the country was already in turmoil from the effects the Civil War.  The Freedmen’s Bureau Act of 1865 was the first emergence of a welfare system.  The Bureau would finance the livelihood of freedmen and black as well as white refugees.  However, the Bureau wasn’t prepared for the staggering number of freedmen and refugees they would have to feed, cloth, provide schools for, healthcare, shelter, employment, and other services.  The success of schools from the Freedmen’s Bureau was one of the positive effects the act had economically.

Socially and politically the Southern whites were not ready to accept Southern blacks as equals.  There are several instances in which the white southern were hostile to the Bureau members that were there to restore peace and prosperity and whites southerners were even more hostile toward freedmen.  The Freedmen’s Bureau did not distribute the land properly like was intended because of disloyal Bureau workers sympathized with the white southerners.  The Bureau failed politically because white and black southerners could not get the help needed from Northern and Southern politicians.

                    However, good intentions of Radical Republicans, the Freedmen’s Bureau Act of 1865 fails because the task of integrating Southern blacks and Southern whites from a society based on slavery to one of freedom was not accomplished.  It wasn’t until several years of tweaking the Act and the addition of the 14^th and 15^th Amendments that some of the social equalities that the Republicans wanted to accomplish actually started to happen.  Eric Foner writes it was “an experiment in social policy that did not belong to the America of its day”.

                                                                  Cited Works
Freedman’s Bureau Act of 1865.  U.S. Statutes at Large (38^th Cong., Sess. II, Chp. 90, p. 507-509)
Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution. New York: Harper and Row, 1988.
Lemann, Nicholas. Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006. xi + 257 pp.