From Slavery to Uncertain Freedom: The Freedman’s Bureau in Arkansas 1865-1869 (Black Community Studies) by Randy Finley published by The University of Arkansas Press (1996) 229 pages; $19.95 Paperback.
From March, 1865 to 1869, the agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau were the thin line separating freedpeople from re-enslavement as the Union armies demobilized. The Bureau’s agents and sub-agents, all of whom had no training for the jobs they assumed, set up schools for black children and adults, orphanages for the parentless, labor bureaus to insure fairness to workers, and hospitals to care for the ill and dying. All the while, they faced social ostracism by white Southerners, mobbing by conservatives, and assassination by the Ku Klux Klan.
Randy Finley’s study of the Freedmen’s Bureau is a study of the few dozen men who ran the Bureau’s offices throughout Arkansas and the teachers, medical staff, and others who worked for them, the work they did, and the challenges that they faced.
Large parts of Arkansas were in Union hands long before Kirby Smith pulled the last organized Confederate forces out of the state at the end of the Civil War. The significant white Unionist minority was apparently an asset to the post-war Reconstruction of Arkansas. However, former Confederates would organize successful violent resistance to efforts to create an economically self-sustaining and politically independent African American community. While these forces of white terror were held at bay during the existence of the Freedmen’s Bureau, when most Bureau functions shut down at the end of 1868, the power of the opponents of Black civil rights increased.
In my experience, Florida and Arkansas are the two least-studied of the Confederate states in terms of secession, Civil War, and Reconstruction. The Freedmen’s Bureau is perhaps one of the best-known Reconstruction institutions, but how many Americans really know what it was and how it operated? Finley’s thin volume fills what might otherwise be a void in Civil War Era studies, and I appreciated his effort to apply modern (for 1996) computer data analysis to his study.
In a book so short though, the text is only 170 pages long, I think that the recap of Reconstruction generally absorbed too much of the work. In all, only about 120 pages were devoted to the Bureau itself. If Finley wanted to tell more of the story of slavery and Reconstruction, this should have been a longer volume. That story should not have led to an abbreviation of his treatment of the Bureau and its staff.
There is not enough in From Slavery to Uncertain Freedom about how Bureau staff saw their mission and the outcomes of their life-endangering work. There is nothing about how the wives and children of Bureau sub-agents experienced living in often-hostile white communities. Some of the voices of freedmen and freedwomen are heard evaluating the Bureau, which is creditable, but the voices of teachers, white and black, as well as Bureau doctors and hospital stewards are virtually silent.
Still, the record of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Arkansas, as presented by Finley, is an admirable one. He offers us a good overview of the labors of people who worked wonders in the three years they had to impact a chaotic society.
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