The Freedmen's Bureau and Reconstruction: Essays on an Institution and Its Failures

398 Pages·1999·37.611 MB·English

by  Paul A. Cimbala, Randall Miller

The Freedmen's Bureau and Reconstruction
RECONSTRUCTING AMERICA
Paul Cimbala, series editor
1. Hans L. Trefousse, Impeachment of a President: Andrew Johnson, the
Blacks, and Reconstruction.
2. Richard Paul Fuke, Imperfect Equality: African Americans and the
Confines of White Ideology in Post-Emancipation Maryland.
3. Ruth Currie-McDaniel, Carpetbagger of Conscience: A Biography of
John Emory Bryant.
The Freedmen's Bureau
and Reconstruction
RECONSIDERATIONS
edited by
PAULA. CIMBALA
and
RANDALL M. MILLER
Fordham University Press
New York
Copyright© 1999 by Fordham University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means--electronic,
mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other--except for brief quotations in
printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN 0-8232-1934-8 (hardcover)
ISBN 0-8232-1935-6 (paperback)
ISSN 1523-4606
Reconstructing America, no. 4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Freedmen's Bureau and Reconstruction I [edited by] Paul A. Cimbala
and Randall M. Miller.-1st ed.
p. em.-(Reconstructing America; no. 4)
Includes index.
ISBN 0-8232-1934-8 (hardcover).-ISBN 0-8232-1935-6 (pbk.)
1. United States. Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned
Lands. 2. United States-Politics and government-1865-1877.
3. Reconstruction-Southern States. 4. Freedmen-Southern States.
5. Southern States-History-1865-1877. 6. Mro-Americans
-History-1863-1877. 7. Southern States-Race relations.
I. Cimbala, Paul A. (Paul Allan), 1951- . II. Miller, Randall M.
III. Series: Reconstructing America (Series) ; no. 4.
E185.2.F858 1999
975'.041-dc21 99-34974
CIP
06 5 4 3
Printed in the United States of America
First Edition
To the Memory of Samuel E. Day (1834-1925),
who saw the war as a beginning
and went north to a new life.-R.M.M
and
To the Memory of George Cimbala (1874-1924),
who found opportunity in a reunited nation.-P.A.C.

CONTENTS
Preface IX
Introduction. The Freedmen's Bureau and
Reconstruction: An Overview Xlll
Randall M Miller
1 Ulysses S. Grant and the Freedmen's Bureau 1
Brooks D. Simpson
2 Andrew Johnson and the Freedmen's Bureau 29
Hans L. Trefousse
3 Emancipation and Military Pacification: The
Freedmen's Bureau and Social Control in Alabama 46
Michael W. Fitzgerald
4 "One of the Most Appreciated Labors of the Bureau":
The Freedmen's Bureau and the Southern Homestead
Act 67
Michael L. Lanza
5 The Personnel of the Freedmen's Bureau in Arkansas 93
Randy Finley
6 Architects of a Benevolent Empire: The Relationship
between the American Missionary Association and the
Freedmen's Bureau in Virginia, 1865-1872 119
E. Allen Richardson
7 "Une Chimere": The Freedmen's Bureau in Creole New
Orleans 140
Caryn Gosse Bell
8 "Because They Are Women": Gender and the Virginia
Freedmen's Bureau's "War on Dependency" 161
Mary J. Farmer
Vlll CONTENTS
9 The Freedmen's Bureau and Wage Labor in the
Louisiana Sugar Region 193
John C. Rodrigue
10 "A Full-Fledged Government of Men": Freedmen's
Bureau Labor Policy in South Carolina, 1865-1868 219
James D. Schmidt
11 "To Enslave the Rising Generation": The Freedmen's
Bureau and the Texas Black Code 261
Barry A. Crouch
12 Land, Lumber, and Learning: The Freedmen's Bureau,
Education and the Black Community in Post-
Emancipation Maryland 288
Richard Paul Fuke
13 Reconstruction's Allies: The Relationship of the
Freedmen's Bureau and the Georgia Freedmen 315
Paul A. Cimba!a
Mterword 343
James M. McPherson
Contributors 349
Index 355
PREFACE
In 1955, George R. Bentley published A History of the Freedmen's Bu
reau, the last full account of the federal Reconstruction agency that
Congress had charged with supervising the South's transition from
slavery to freedom. Since that time, a sea change in Reconstruction
historiography has occurred. At the center of much discussion about
how Republicans tried to translate Union victory and emancipation
in war into a new order in peace has been the role of the Freedmen's
Bureau. The Bureau, after all, stood as the principal expression and
extension of federal authority in the defeated South. Through the
Bureau, the federal government would assume new responsibilities
in providing relief to refugees and ex-slaves, trying to settle the ex
slaves on land (and then removing them from land), overseeing labor
contracts and adjudicating labor disputes, building schools, and
more. Through the Bureau, the Republican party would carry its
ideas about a free-labor political economy southward. But, as histor
ies of Reconstruction reiterate, the Bureau did not get its way. In
the end, black freedom and free-labor ideas were only partly, and
often precariously, planted.
Historians have disagreed on the effectiveness of the Bureau in
securing freedom and remaking the South. Some have argued that
the Freedmen's Bureau, along with the army, undercut black free
dom by seeking to restore agricultural production and minimize so
cial and political change. Others have viewed the Bureau as
fundamental in tearing down the old order and helping blacks claim
equality before the law and opportunity on the land. Still others
have suggested that however much the Bureau might have preferred
continuity over revolution in a postwar South, at least in the short
run, the Bureau's long-term commitment to basic civil rights for
blacks worked against the unyielding white commitment to keep
blacks down forever. Whatever the true assessment of the Bureau's
role-and the debate continues-it is now time to revisit the Bureau
as a whole, to bring scholarship on the Bureau together, to take stock
X PREFACE
of the literature, and to point new directions for inquiry. Thus this
book.
Much of the best recent work on the Bureau and Reconstruction
has observed ideas and people in action. In doing so, scholars have
come to appreciate that the story of the Bureau was more than the
political wrangling between Andrew Johnson and Radical Republi
cans in Washington. Scholars now remind us that no single story or
typology represented the whole of the Bureau. There were in fact
many Bureaus, as agents, freedpeople, and white southerners negoti
ated, sometimes violently, the meaning of freedom in their local
areas. Getting down to cases revealed the permutations of Bureau
agents' beliefs, strategies, and personalities. It also showed that
black and white southerners approached the Bureau as suited their
own particular needs. As such, the Bureau was in a constant state
of evolution and adaptation. Considering the obstacles of racism,
southerners' distrust of outsiders, the temporary status of the Bu
reau as an agency, the Bureau's limited resources, the lack of a sig
nificant military presence to support the Bureau, among a host of
constraints, it is a wonder the Bureau succeeded at all. At the same
time, the many state and local studies of the Bureau all seem to
suggest that, however weak institutionally or racist personally, the
Bureau altered the assumptions and calculus of local power and race
relations. Simply by being there to oversee a labor contract or hear
the complaint of an ex-slave or a planter was to interrupt, even dis
rupt, the complete economic and social power claimed by whites
over blacks before emancipation. If nothing else, the Bureau showed
that slavery was dead. On that point, the scholars agree.
Despite the recognition of the Bureau's significance, the agency
has yet to be presented in a comprehensive book-length study that
addresses the new historiographical trends and integrates questions,
such as the role of gender in the formation of Bureau policy, that
would have surprised Bentley and his generation of scholars. That
the Bureau still wants a new history is the consequence, in part, of
the agency's own voluminous archive. The National Archives houses
thousands of linear feet of loose papers and bound volumes and hun
dreds of rolls of microfilm of Bureau material. It is almost too much
for anyone but the most devoted Bureau scholar to peruse in a life
time. Scholars have not ignored the Bureau, but few have actually
devoted full-dress studies to the agency at the state and local levels.