Too Great a Burden to Bear: The Struggle and Failure of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Texas by Christopher B. Bean published by Fordham University Press (2016) $25.00 Paperback $26.00 E-Textbook
Many areas of Reconstruction studies are little understood beyond a small number of academic specialists. One of the least understood by the general reader is the Freedmen’s Bureau. The Bureau was the first Federal program concerned with the welfare of a portion of the population, but it had few resources and was extremely short-lived. I wonder how many Americans have ever heard of it and, if they have, if they know that it only existed in most places between mid-1865 and the end of 1868.
The Freedmen’s Bureau was set up in response to the crises that enveloped many parts of the South as the Confederacy collapsed before an advancing Union Army and millions of African Americans were freed from bondage. As blacks were freed, there was an immediate crisis of lack of food and medical care for the freedpeople. Thousands died during this transitional phase. In addition to the immediate needs of life that the Bureau had to fill, there were longer-term issues as well.
Neither freedpeople nor former slaveowners had much previous experience with free labor. Both employer and worker needed to understand that free labor was not just slavery by another name. The Bureau also had to provide the first public education for blacks that most Southern communities had ever had. It was also a transmitter of new national policies on race. As African Americans were granted increased civil rights, the Bureau would play a role in educating whites and blacks about those rights and helping to enforce them.
Too Great a Burden to Bear traces the history of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Texas through the work of the Sub-Assistant Commissioners (SACs) who are commonly called Freedmen’s Bureau Agents today. There is background information on national policy coming from Commissioner O.O. Howard, and state policies from the Sub-Commissioners, but the strength of this book is its local focus. The way the SACs were recruited and selected, the limited training and guidance that they received, and the day to day work of the SACs make up the bulk of materials in Too Great a Burden to Bear.
Nearly every aspect of the Civil War was unexpected and improperly planned for. Escaped slaves began coming into Union lines long before Congress, the President, or the Army high command ever anticipated. Thousands of former slaves died when the Union forces ignored their needs or provided inadequate resources to them.
At the same time, Southern planters faced a severe labor shortage as their labor force walked the few miles to where Union camps were. When Union troops refused to return escapees or allow putative “owners” to beat their former slaves, plantations lay fallow and crucial economic activity ceased. Getting production restarted under a free labor system was one motivator for the Freedmen’s Bureau.
Congress did not try to address this need until 1864 when a commission began to design the Bureau. It was not until the last months of the war that the Bureau was created. Even then Congress did not really give much guidance about what the Bureau should look like and how it should approach its work. As Congressman Robert Schenk said during the debate:
it is better, from the very nature of the case, as it is a matter which relates to an emergency, to a necessity, to an accident, as it were of the times and the condition of the war in which we are, that the system should build itself up and grow by accretion and development according to the necessities as they arise or are found to exist . . . If you attempt to provide in advance for every particular thing, if you have complicated machinery in this bill, or simple machinery even, running so much into detail, you run the risk of not accomplishing the object you seek, but, on the contrary, the further risk of defeating the very object which you are engaged in by raising endless questions as to the meaning or application of this particular provision of this law. (p. 1-2)
The Bureau would follow an uncertain path towards a disputed destination. The SACs, sitting in offices in isolated Texas towns could be forgiven if they did not always know what to do.
Most Texas Bureau agents had served in the military. The Bureau was part of the War Department and its leadership often preferred men who were familiar with the bureaucratic requirements of a government agency. As decentralized as the agency was, there was a constant flow of paper from the field. Many had been officers who had led black troops.
Texas had more agents than other nearby states, but the total number rarely exceeded seventy. In other words, the state’s Reconstruction program was administered by fewer men than would constitute a company in an infantry regiment.
Christopher Bean uses Bureau, military, and Census records to create charts and graphs describing the Bureau men. Their ages, prior occupations, and places of birth are subjects of charts. I found out that one-in-seven agents was an immigrant and that the average agent lasted less than eight months.
Turnover was a problem throughout the Texas Bureau with the agency having four different Subcommissioners in three years. The dangers and demands of the position, and the frustrating opposition of local whites to the very existence of an organization protecting the rights of blacks made this a job that extracted pounds of flesh from those who held it.
One of the earliest and most controversial acts of the Bureau was to encourage freedpeople and employers to make contracts for labor. The contracts needed to be examined by the agents and approved by them. The agents understood that the mostly illiterate former slaves could easily be taken advantage of by their employers, so they examined the contracts for basic fairness. Many early proposed contracts contained clauses in which payment would be made at the completion of the contract and provided that if the worker were discharged he forfeit all right to payment, no matter how much labor had already been completed. Others included clauses allowing employers to assume the role of “Master” and impose corporal punishment such as whippings on employees who were often described in the documents as “servants.”
The agents also conducted meetings with the freedmen explaining the general ideas of contracts and encouraging them to fulfill their labor agreements. Many agents were worried that if agricultural production was not resumed local communities might suffer financial ruin and starvation and dispossession of land might follow.
Bean does a good job of explaining the many mundane tasks of the agents, which represented a revolutionary departure for a Federal agency. Keeping newly freed men and women fed, helping long separated families find relatives who had been sold away, establishing medical care for the ill and aged.
The agents also carefully recorded the names and relationships of the freedpeople under their jurisdiction. People who had formerly only been enumerated in the Census as “slave” or by first name only now had identities worth keeping for posterity. African American marriages were also now entered into with the agents memorializing the solemn act.
In 1867 as newly enfranchised freedmen were registered to vote, the Texas Freedmen’s Bureau suffered through what Bean calls its “Year of Crucifiction.” Political violence and yellow fever took the lives of nine SACs. The feud over Reconstruction between the President and Congress was played out in the towns and cities of Texas. White terrorism only increased in 1868. When blacks organized to resist, incredibly some whites demanded that the Freedmen’s Bureau disarm them. One agent responded that he would only take guns away from freedmen when “the whites put a stop to . . . the K Ks.” (p. 158)
At the end of 1868 the Freedmen’s Bureau ceased nearly all of its functions in Texas, as in the rest of the South. Scarce resources, an unclear mission, and muddled procedures limited its effectiveness, but for three years it had served as the first agency dedicated to enhancing the condition of black people.
Bean’s book is a balanced account of men struggling to do good in a difficult environment with the bullets flying around them. None had been trained for the job and it is likely that none even imagined they might fill such a position even as late as 1864. Bean gives both a statistical and anecdotal account of this misunderstood Bureau.
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