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Freedmen's Bureau
2 articles on Freedmen's Bureau
Freedmen's Bureau
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
Word Count: 2056 Includes: BibliographyThe Thirty-Eighth Congress established the Freedmen's Bureau so that the federal government could shoulder relief for African Americans displaced by the Civil War. Before the establishment of the Freedmen's Bureau, relief work for the contrabands (African American war refugees) was largely accomplished by private individuals and institutions. In March 1865, as the Civil War drew to its close, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (Freedmen's Bureau) was established. Following Abraham Lincoln's assassination, President Andrew Johnson appointed Oliver Otis Howard, who had been a major general during the Civil War, to serve as its first commissioner. At its inception the Freedmen's Bureau aimed to help both former slaves and displaced white southerners settle on land abandoned during the Civil War. This land ...
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Source: The Oxford Companion to United States History
Word Count: 350To assist the adjustment of newly freed slaves in the post–Civil War South, Congress in March 1865 established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands under the leadership of General Oliver Otis Howard and the auspices of the War Department. Given an initial life of one year, the agency provided food, clothing, fuel, and medical treatment to destitute and dislocated freedpeople and white refugees. It was also supposed to parcel out abandoned and confiscated lands in forty-acre plots to freedmen, but President Andrew Johnson, a staunch critic of the agency, undercut this effort by restoring most of the available land to its former white owners. Local Bureau agents thus spent much time mediating labor contracts and disputes between the freedmen and intransigent white employers and attempting to secure economic and civil justice for the freedmen—even ...
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