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(1865-72), during the Reconstruction
period after the American Civil War ,
popular name for the U.S. Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands,
established by Congress to provide practical aid to 4,000,000 newly freed black
Americans in their transition from slavery to freedom. Headed by Major
General Oliver O. Howard , the Freedmen's Bureau
might be termed the first federal welfare agency. Despite handicaps of
inadequate funds and poorly trained personnel, the bureau built hospitals for,
and gave direct medical assistance to, more than 1,000,000 freedmen. More than
21,000,000 rations were distributed to impoverished blacks as well as whites.
(see also South,
the, Reconstruction, Howard,
Oliver O.) |
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Its greatest accomplishments were in
education: more than 1,000 black schools were built and over $400,000 spent to
establish teacher-training institutions. All major black colleges were either
founded by, or received aid from, the bureau. Less success was achieved in civil
rights, for the bureau's own courts were poorly organized and
short-lived, and only the barest forms of due process of law for freedmen could
be sustained in the civil courts. Its most notable failure concerned the land
itself. Thwarted by President Andrew Johnson's restoration of abandoned lands to
pardoned Southerners and by the adamant refusal of Congress to consider any form
of land redistribution, the bureau was forced to oversee sharecropping
arrangements that inevitably became oppressive. Congress, preoccupied with other
national interests and responding to the continued hostility of white
Southerners, terminated the bureau in July 1872. (see also education,
history of ) |
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