Secret Societies of Reconstruction: The KKK, The White Camelia, The Union League of America, and the excesses of the Radical Republicans by Fleming Walter L

Author:Fleming, Walter L. [Fleming, Walter L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

The Freedmen’s Bureau

The Bureau of Freedmen, Refugees, and Abandoned Lands was created by an act of Congress, approved March 3, 1865. On July 16, 1866, a supplementary act passed over the President’s veto extended the Bureau for two years. July 6, 1868, a third act extended it for one more year in the unreconstructed states. A fourth act, on July 25, 1868, provided for the discontinuance of the Bureau after January 1, 1869, except as to the educational and bounty divisions. Finally, on June 10, 1872, an act abolished the Bureau after June 30, 1872, and turned its affairs over to the Secretary of War for settlement.

From 1861 to 1865 the Federal government had to provide in some way for the numerous blacks who crowded into the Union lines. The policies pursued were various and conflicting. Some commanders put the refugee negroes to work on fortifications or about the camps; others concentrated them in camps or colonies under the supervision of army officers, usually chaplains; all of them gave sup­plies to the negroes. The Treasury Department had control of prop­erty confiscated under the acts of Congress, and its agents employed freedmen to cultivate the plantations; many colonies of blacks were thus established. Numerous Freedmen’s Aid Societies in the North cooperated with the government in looking after the negroes in the camps and colonies. There was in the War Department an unofficial “Department of Negro Affairs,” which also attended to matters re­lating to negroes. Neither the War Department nor the Treasury was responsible for all that pertained to the blacks; first one and then the other seemed to be in control. Practically all of the camps, plantations, colonies, and communities failed because of Incompetent and corrupt agents in charge.

The Freedmen’s Bureau Act transferred the entire control of the blacks to a bureau of the War Department. It was to attend to all matters relating to white Union refugees, confiscated property, and negroes. At the head of the Bureau was the Commissioner, General O. O. Howard, with an assistant commissioner in each state. In prac­tice, the Bureau was independent of, or rather superior to, the mili­tary and provisional civil administration in the South; it was in real­ity a complete government with almost despotic powers over the 4,000,000 blacks of the South; it removed them entirely from the con­trol of the civil government and subordinated the civil government to itself. Its principal legal activities were in relief work, education, regulation of labor, and administration of justice.

In the relief work it spent about $2,000,000 for hospitals and dis­pensary service among the Freedmen; about $4,500,000 was expended for food and clothes, 21,000,000 rations being distributed; something more than $1,500,000 was expended in transporting 30,000 negroes, 4,000 white refugees, 4,000 teachers and missionaries, and 2,000 offi­cials. Upon negro education the Bureau expended about $5,200,000, principally in aid of the schools established by benevolent societies from the North. The whole field of labor legislation was covered. The Bureau regulated contracts, wages, hours, rations, clothing, and quar­ters; it

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