By October, 1868, when this report on the work of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Virginia was published, the Bureau was just three months away from shutting down most of its activities. Many readers are surprised that the Bureau did not continue through the end of Reconstruction, but the former Confederate states were supposed to take on its functions of protecting former slaves once they enacted new constitutions allowing Black men to vote. The theory, though unfortunately not the practice, was that the new color-blind constitutions of the Reconstructed states would allow the Federal government to withdraw from its role as protector of African Americans in the South. As the report makes clear, many Blacks were persecuted in 1868 precisely because they now had the right to vote.
As the section on race relations says: “The fundamental doctrine of the Conservative whites has been that negro suffrage is an insult to their race and an outrage upon their rights. This feeling is intense, and causes the negro to be regarded as a positive enemy. In many sections of the State large numbers of blacks are under warning that they will be turned out of employment and driven off their lands if they vote Republican. In the scenes of violence…the negroes were always the victims, and the whites always the assailants.”
In this report, there is some surprising information for readers not knowledgeable about the operations of the Bureau. The first fact is that the Bureau only employed 69 people in the state. While the ‘Lost Cause” myth depicts the Bureau as a massive bureaucracy, it was in fact tiny in each state where it functioned.
The Freed Men’s Bureau In Virginia. Report For The Last Year
Cincinnati Daily Gazette
Friday, Oct 30, 1868
Cincinnati, OH
Page: 1
One role of the Bureau was to assist those African Americans denied justice in the local white-controlled Virginia state courts to receive a hearing by Federal tribunals. As the report states, the trials of whites who murdered African Americans in the state courts was “generally a farce,” necessitating the intervention of the Bureau.
The next section of the report expains the attitudes of the “Conservative” whites towards African Americans. It begins by saying that the Conservatives viewed Blacks being allowed to vote as “an insult” to the white race.
The Freedmen’s Bureau had a “Commissary Department” which supplied food to indigent Blacks and White refugees. A particular concern was elderly and infirm former slaves. These men and women had been held in slavery for their entire working lives. Now that they could no longer work they were thrown off the plantations where they had been enslaved without any means of support. The Bureau’s agents were rightly concerned that if the Bureau’s commissary was shut down in January, 1869, the suffering of the elderly and infirm would only increase.
One of the great achievements of the Bureau was the establishment of the first-ever public schools in many parts of the South. According to the report, the Bureau had 231 schools in Virgina alone in 1868. 16,403 students were enrolled in what were mostly one-room schoolhouses. It is interesting to read how they were supported finacially, with more than half of the money coming from Northern charitable organizations and some of the money coming from the African American community in Virginia.
Got a link to the cited work? My Google-Fu fails me.
I used the copy published in the pages of the Cincinnati Daily Gazette. The copy I used is behind a paywall, unfortunately.
Thanks for posting this excellent piece. Many of the Freedmen’s Bureau officers were among the real heroes of Reconstruction, although their efforts were obscured by later Lost Cause revisionism. They struggled against often terrible odds and with inadequate resources to sustain the rights of the freed people and to make the promise of the Union victory a reality. The national government’s failure to continue financing the bureau and to protect its field workers was catastrophic for freed people’s hopes. Even so, countless bureau offices, both white and black, and vast numbers of freed people who benefited from their labors — by becoming educated to their rights — went on to play important political, social and economic roles during Reconstruction and in some cases long afterward. Such men and women were typically the prime targets of Ku Klux terrorism.
Thanks for posting Fergus. I did a lot of research into one Bureau agent in Helena, Ark. and saw just what you say. He helped found schools, an orphanage, and a teachers college for Blacks and he fought the KKK.
This is a good article. I am by no means an authority on Reconstruction, but I have a few critiques offered in good faith to induce critical reflection. These include-
A) The Lost Cause is not a ‘myth’; it is a historiography, a school of historical thought that has a distinct pattern in how it examines, garners evidence, extracts meaning from this, writes about history and passes this on to succeeding generations. As with all historiographies, (ie. the Laurentian Thesis school of Canadian history by P.B. Waite or Donald Creighton, or the ‘Black Armband’ view of Australian history by Manning Clark), it has a variable measure of validity to at least a fair number of tenets, along with particular inset errs and limits to how much history it can satisfactorily explain. Historians such as Gary Gallagher, etc, whom describe it as this can only do so by deliberately skewing what the actual definition of a ‘myth’ is and isn’t.
B) The information that is presented here is quite correct; a high amount of White, former-Confederates in the South, (civilian, military and government, etc), did oppose the enfranchisement of Black Americans in the South. Wide-spread racism and entrenched White supremacy played a significant part in this; residual militancy in the South was another, (similar to the Anti-Treaty IRA units which rejected the Anglo-Irish Treaty); near-total disenfranchisement of the White, former-Confederate population, rather than a scheme that would have nudged societal cooperation, (ie. at least a temporary scheme to provide a rough and ready equal number of legislators of all races, in order to lay the groundwork of a tradition of working together in government, something along the lines of British and French Canadians in the combined colony of Canada); lack of education standards to stand for office that would be enforced equally for all governmental representatives, or at least encouraged unofficially in good faith with federal supervision and local implementation.
C) In the key interim-years of about 1865-70, the lack of wide-spread popular support, and downright rejection, for Black American suffrage in the North, gave fuel to Southern resistance to these measures.
This does not justify a ‘what aboutism’ methodology; it does help in forming a holistic and widely informed perspective. It also forces a realisation for historical perspectives and arguments that, ‘the door swings both ways’. An argument engaged for one purpose can be just as validly applied against.
For example, when Robert E. Lee faced the 1866 Congressional Panel in Washington DC, and gave his famed testimony, the very Panel member whom questioned the General about Black American suffrage in Virginia, represented the state of Michigan. This state had rejected extending the franchise to Black Americans in that state in a referendum the day before Lee’s testimony.
D) This article enhances the actions of Robert E. Lee in this era, and sheds light on how the Lost Cause manipulated his actual actions and stances in a calculated manner that was nigh-inconsistent with what he actually advocated, which included advocacy of Black American suffrage in the same terms as Abraham Lincoln, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and Oliver Howard, education for Black Americans, public demonstrations for racial equality before and under the law, acceptance of and gladness for the end of slavery and acceptance of the social-racial status quo of the South changing and eschewing militancy and nationalism for pride and patriotism.
This article is extremely well-written and documented and in particular, I enjoyed the numerous leads to primary evidence. A gold work!