Freedmen's Bureau Research Paper

From April 1861-1865, twenty-three Northern states and eleven seceding states would battle for the fate of the Union. 630,000, 2% of the U.S. population, would die, with another 500,000 wounded . When the “war of rebellion” officially ended, with the surrender of General Johnston and his troops on April 26, 1865, the monumental issue the federal government and the nation debated was not the immense humanitarian crisis facing the South among all races, but the constitutional standing of the newly merged Southern territory .The contention among various politicians over interpreting the Constitution in the context of the period would overshadow any efforts made to support freedmen and freedwomen in the South. One such effort was the establishment of “a bureau for the relief of Freedmen and Refugees ” presently known as the Freedmen’s Bureau. The Bureau, though it experienced a few hard-won successes, eventually failed, trapped in the quagmire of Constitutional legality, local Southern Resistance, and a power struggle between the executive and legislative branches.
At the end of the war, the South lay in ruins and the need for a support and welfare agency was immense. Railroads had been torn up, as in Figure 1, and …show more content…
As early as 1866, there were too few bureau agents and too little military power to enforce bureau mandates. The blow that would seal the Bureau’s fate was the Military Reconstruction Acts of 1867. The bill gave Union military commanders the authority to appoint Bureau agents in their own districts. With the approval of this bill by Congress, the Bureau commissioner lost much of his remaining power and the Bureau became no more than a puppet of regional commander. On July 2, 1874, Oliver Howard, Commissioner of the Bureau, was ordered to take command of the Department of the Columbia and the Bureau was essentially disbanded

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