FREEDMEN'S BUREAU, The supervision, temporary maintenance and em ployment of the mass of homeless, penniless and untaught freedmen created by emancipa tion was an obvious duty of the government, urged upon it at once after the proclamation of 1 Jan. 1863; and in 1863-64 officials were ap pointed to lease abandoned lands to them for terms not exceeding a year. The military offi cers left much of the care and provision for freedmen in their hands; but a more compre hensive plan was needed, and after various abortive efforts at an acceptable measure, a "Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Aban doned Lands° was established in the War De partment, 3 March 1865, to continue for a year after the war. It was to be headed commissioner, with assistant commissioners in all the seceded States; to issue supplies to destitute freedmen, have charge of abandoned lands to lease and ultimately sell in 40-acre plots, and have gconet-ol of all subjects relating to refugees and freedmee—an elastic pro vision construed in the most elastic way. Its commissioners— the head being Gen. O. O. Howard (q.v.), a noble-minded and laborious philanthropist — acted as courts of law where there were none, or where negroes were not recognized as free; established the institution of marriage, and kept records; assured the freedmen the right to choose employers, and made fair contracts for them. The "abandoned lands° disappeared under the amnesty acts; but the bureau did excellent work by inaugurating free schools on a large scale. On 6 Feb. 1866 Congress passed a bill to enlarge its powers and make it permanent; Johnson successfully vetoed it, but on 16 July another was passed over his veto, extending the bureau to July 1868, later extended a year in unreconstructed States. Under this its sweeping powers made it largely the government of the South under Reconstruction, especially as the department military commanders were usually made assist ant commissioners; and the demoralizing and disastrous struggle of the North to secure negro independence and of the South to re assert white mastery, is a history of part of the bureau's action — through executive and legislative powers scarcely pretended to be constitutional, and to transfer which to the regular courts the Fifteenth Amendment was passed. The bureau was regarded with detes
tation in the South; a large number of its offi cers secured office through negro support; and its influence was exercised in organizing the blacks politically against the whites. Better features of its work were the foundation of the free public schools in the South, and of Fisk, Howard and Atlantic universities, and Hamp ton Institute; of the system of negro peasant proprietorship; and the winning of equal rights for all men in the courts. That it failed in its larger hopes, and that its harmful results were so great that many hold them far in excess of its benefits, are facts attributed by the fairest judges to the inevitable conditions of the prob lem. (See a very lucid and singularly just summary by W. E B. DuBois — colored — in the Atlantic Monthly, Vol. LXXXVII, p. 354). The bureau ended its main work in 1869• its educational work continued till 1872, and bounty' payments some years longer. It had about 900 agents in 1868; and expended in all some $20,000,000, over $10,000,000 on objects unconnected with soldiers' bounties. General Howard published a report of its work in the House Executive Documents, 41st Congress, 2d session. Consult Pierce, The Freedmen's Bureau' (Iowa City 1904).