The Freedmen’s Bureau

Who Were They?

What Were They Trying to Accomplish?

General Outline

I. What was the Freedmen’s Bureau?

II. Why was the Freedmen’s Bureau important?

III. Who were the men who administered the Bureau?

A. National level

B. State level

C. Local level (the men “in the trenches”)

IV. Were Bureau agents conservative servants of the old planter class? Or well-intentioned men who hoped to see the old Confederacy abandon its old ways and

join

the modern world?

President Andrew Johnson vetoes the Bureau bill

The view of the Republicans in Congress

The view of many white southerners

The Bureau provided rations for the unemployed

The Bureau as “honest broker” between former masters and slaves

A Freedmen’s Bureau school

An exterior view of a Bureau school

An interior view

The burning of a Freedmen’s Bureau school

Everybody wanted something from the Bureau

A marriage ceremony arranged by the Bureau

Bureau regulations on marriage

A Bureau marriage certificate

The Bureau oversaw black voting for the first time in U.S. history

The first vote in Virginia, 1867

Long lines at the polls

Election day became a social occasion in New Orleans

Where were Texas Bureau agents from?

Geographic Origins

Number Percent

Outside CSA 160 86.5

Old CSA 25 13.5

Geographic Origins, Non-CSA

Number Percent

Free States 120 75

Union Slave States 12 7.5

Foreign 28 17.5

Bureau men = city folkTexans = country folk

Occupation Percent of Bureau Agents

Percent of Texans

Professional (law, medicine, military)

64.8 17.2

Farming 17.1 70.4

Commerce and Industry

18.1 12.4

A study of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Texas:

[Bureau] agents established some order where only chaos had

existed, discouraged the resumption of hostilities against the

Union, protected freed people against white violence, educated

the freedmen, and helped establish them as self-reliant,

individualistic Americans with the same legal rights as whites.

They established the former slaves as something they had never

been in the slaveholding South: citizens.

A study of the Bureau in Virginia:

The Freedmen’s Bureau in Virginia did not cater to the whims of the

old master class. The actions of Bureau officers pointed toward

change, not stasis, the future, not the past. [In searching for

Virginians to take over public office from the old Confederacy], the

Freedmen’s Bureau searched out those who promised the best hope

for change in the Old Dominion, not those who were wedded to “the

world before the flood.”