[This weekend
marks the 150th anniversary of the landmark Civil
Rights Act of 1866, one of many such Reconstruction sesquicentennials
over the next decade. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five Reconstruction
histories, leading up to a special weekend post on the Civil Rights Act.]
On a major and
telling reason why the Bureau failed, and two lasting legacies nonetheless.
The March 3, 1865 legislation
which established the federal Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands
(better known as the Freedmen’s
Bureau) includes a stunning detail that reflects just how ill prepared the
nation was for the realities of Reconstruction: the Bureau was initially
intended to exist for only one year. As a result, when the Congressional
Republicans supporting Reconstruction passed a bill to renew the Bureau’s charter
one year later, in February 1866, President
Andrew Johnson vetoed the bill (one more example in the long list of “What
if Lincoln had lived?” hypotheticals), and over the subsequent few years
the Bureau became increasingly under-funded, -staffed, and –supported. By 1869
the Bureau was operating only a skeleton staff; by 1872 the Bureau’s director, former
Union General Oliver Howard, had been transferred to the West to handle
Native American policy, and the Bureau ceased operations entirely. Yet in
truth, this seemingly essential Reconstruction program only experienced one
year of full support, a telling representation of how significantly hamstrung
Reconstruction efforts were from their very outset.
Despite those
significant limitations, however, and despite the intense opposition it faced
during and after 1865-66 from discriminatory Black
Codes, the terrors of the Ku
Klux Klan, and so many other aspects of postbellum Southern society, the
Bureau achieved a number of impressive, lasting results. The most prominent
such effects were those related to education, and they took hold very quickly
and potently: by the end of 1865, nearly 100,000
former slaves were enrolled in public schools run by or in conjunction with
the Bureau, and despite all the obstacles confronting those students attendance
rates apparently remained steady around 80%. When the post-1866 cuts in funding
and staffing made it nearly impossible to run all these schools (church groups
and other communities fortunately stepped in to keep many running), the Bureau
shifted its focus to creating
institutions of higher education: nearly 25 such colleges were created
between 1865 and 1872, and many of them (such as Howard University, Fisk
University, and Tougaloo College) remain in service today as historically black
colleges and universities (HBCUs). In and of themselves those colleges and
universities represent a potent legacy of the Bureau’s educational efforts.
Far more
intimate and thus more difficult to quantify, but at least as significant, were
the Bureau’s efforts to assist freed people’s families, including working to
reunite separate family members and performing marriages. Marriages
during slavery were neither legal nor binding, and that reality both made
family reunification that much more difficult and presented a host of other
legal and social problems in the postbellum world. By not only performing
but legalizing marriages between former slaves, then, the Bureau was able
to fundamentally alter the legal and social as well as familial realities for
these freed men and women, and for their families, descendents, and
communities. Charles Chesnutt’s stunning short story “The
Wife of His Youth” (1898) highlights how complicated but also how crucial
were ideas of marriage and family for those who had experienced the fragility
and absence of those core human experiences under slavery. In helping counter
those horrific past realities and offer freed men and women a much different
set of marital and family possibilities, the Bureau performed both a human and
historical service whose legacies cannot be overstated.
Next
Reconstruction remembrance tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Reconstruction histories you’d highlight?
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