07-03-2025
The Freedmen's Bureau: How Racist Lawmakers Thwarted an Early Attempt at Reparations
After more than two and half centuries of slavery, the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the 13th Amendment, Black people in America were no longer bound by the violent constraints of slavery — legally. Nonetheless, the transition from enslavement to life post-emancipation was not going to be easy. In an attempt to support this transition, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly referred to as the Freedmen's Bureau, was established.
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This year marks 160 years since that bureau's creation, which makes this a great time to recognize its legacy, its unfulfilled promises, and what we can learn from it all. Although this agency was short-lived — lasting from 1865 until 1872 — its impact was huge, including the pivotal role it played for Black Americans transitioning from slavery to life as freedpeople and the stories it continues to illuminate about generations of Black folks and American history.
The Freedmen's Bureau was established on March 3, 1865, when the act that created it was passed by Congress and later signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln. As the National Archives explains, the bureau provided basic necessities like food, clothing, medical care, and temporary camps for shelter. It helped freedpeople legalize marriages and locate family members, as many Black families were routinely and violently ripped apart during slavery. It helped Black soldiers and sailors collect back pay, bounty payments, and pensions.
The Freedmen's Bureau also helped freedpeople navigate labor contracts, sometimes helping them negotiate better terms than those offered that were still in alignment with the Black codes, laws passed by Southern state governments after the war that placed extreme limitations on the rights of Black people. According to the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), these laws 'required newly freed people to sign labor contracts with white planters on terms almost indistinguishable from slavery.'
Education was another major focus for the bureau. It set up schools for newly freed Black people and poor white people. US Army officer Otis Howard, who was appointed commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau in 1865, used funds from the bureau to purchase land and construct campus buildings for the first historically Black college and university (HBCU), Howard University. The bureau also helped establish other HBCUs during Reconstruction, including Fisk University and Morehouse College.
Another crucial piece of support the bureau offered was helping freedpeople purchase land. In the beginning, one of its most ambitious goals was land redistribution.
On January 12, 1865, 20 Black leaders in Savannah, Georgia, mostly Baptist and Methodist ministers, met with General William T. Sherman and Lincoln's secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton, to discuss the needs of formerly enslaved people. That meeting resulted in General Sherman's Special Field Order 15, which set aside land on the southeast coast for formerly enslaved people. The order, which stated 'so that each family shall have a plot of not more than forty acres of tillable ground…,' led to the origin of the phrase '40 acres and a mule' — America's most famous attempt to provide some form of reparations for American slavery.
'Initially, the bureau planned to lease these lands — up to 40 acres — to the freedpeople for a set time, generally three years, and then allow them to purchase the land. This was the ultimate desire of the freedpeople,' Damani Davis, an archivist who oversees the National Archives' Freedmen's Bureau collection, tells Teen Vogue. 'They wanted and needed a permanent or long-term federal institution that would help them achieve their dream of economic independence and self-autonomy through ownership, rigorous educational opportunities, protection, and equality before the law.'
By June of that year, around 40,000 Black people had been settled on the land set aside for them through Sherman's orders. Initiatives like land redistribution initially offered hope for economic independence and self-sufficiency, but were curtailed by President Andrew Johnson.
In April, one month after the Freedmen's Bureau was established, Lincoln was assassinated, then Johnson took office. Johnson, a white supremacist, had land taken from many of the freedpeople and returned to former Confederates. By the summer of 1866, most of the land had been taken back.
'The will to truly support the transition of the Freedpeople from enslavement to self-sufficient citizenship was not there. The Freedmen's Bureau was never adequately funded or allowed to become a long-term agency committed to a true transition from slavery to freedom,' explains Davis. 'The former Confederates, and most white Southerners in general, opposed any federal support for the Freedpeople that would contribute in any way to their social, economic, educational, or political advancement.'
Perhaps more importantly, though, political opposition also hampered the Bureau's effectiveness. The agency was initially supposed to exist for one year, but in 1866, lawmakers sought to remove the expiration date and expand support to include freedpeople and refugees everywhere across the United States, not just the South. Iterations of the bill were vetoed by President Johnson twice before the Senate and the House overrode the veto. On July 16, 1866, the Freedmen's Bureau Act of 1866 became law.
But just seven years after its creation, in 1872, it was disbanded. 'Unfortunately, throughout its entire short existence," says Davis, 'it was completely hamstrung by those who opposed it and did not want it to succeed in fulfilling aspirations held by Black Americans and their supporters.'
Though the Freedmen's Bureau ceased operations in 1872, it resulted in the creation of millions of records with the names and information of hundreds of thousands of formerly enslaved people. Labor contracts, marriage certificates, and reports on racial violence documented the lives and struggles of freedpeople during Reconstruction. These records are invaluable to historians, genealogists, and descendants of the formerly enslaved.
'The records provide a wealth of information that could be useful for those who are interested in learning about the beginnings of Reconstruction, the end of slavery, and a lot of precursors to the violence and the eventual triumph of Jim Crow,' says Davis. 'A lot of the precursors to things that happened later are highlighted within the Freedmen's Bureau records.'
NMAAHC is currently leading a transcription project to digitize these records and make them more accessible to the public. Anyone can begin searching through the records online. This critical resource has revealed — and continues to reveal — previously unknown information about countless Black Americans, enabling their stories to be told, and fostering a deeper understanding of American history.
The Freedmen's Bureau's achievements in education, legal advocacy, and recordkeeping laid the groundwork for future civil rights advancements. Its brief existence was a testament to the federal government's capacity to address systemic inequality. 'When looked at in the context of its limited resources, the political opposition that it faced, and the short timeframe of its existence, the Freedmen's Bureau can be viewed as a relative success in the work that it was able to accomplish and the services that it did provide,' says Davis.
However, the agency's limited lifespan and unfulfilled promises do underscore the failure to provide reparations for formerly enslaved people and their descendants. With the reversal of land redistribution efforts, many freedpeople were left without the means to achieve economic independence. This has had a lasting impact, contributing to the many inequities faced by Black folks — including the racial wealth gap — that persists today. 'From the standpoint of Black Americans' broader needs, hopes, and aspirations, it was a failure," says Davis. "But that wasn't necessarily the fault of the Freedmen's Bureau itself.'
Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
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