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Congress established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands—more commonly known as the Freedmen's Bureau—in March 1865. Upon its creation, the short-lived and unprecedented federal agency assumed the Herculean task of overseeing the transition from slavery to freedom in the immediate post-emancipation South. It became the embodiment of the triumphant North in a defeated South, and its agents the very face of federal authority. This bureau profoundly affected the lives of African-American women in the age of emancipation. Aside from applying the northern economic theory of free labor in a southern context, the bureau also worked to institute a social reconstruction based on northern middle-class notions of domesticity, dependency, and family relations. Whatever the intentions and actions of bureau officials stationed across the South, freedwomen—much like freedmen—encountered, trusted, and challenged the bureau and used it to their own ends. The bureau accomplished a great deal before being officially dismantled in 1872.

The realization of policy of the Freedmen's Bureau rested foremost on its officials at the local level. Using the gospel of free labor as the platform, bureau officials and agents across the South sought to convey to freedpeople not only the great rewards of free labor but also what they understood to be the rights, obligations, and values of freedom. Beyond applying the economic theory of free labor in a southern context, then, the bureau sought to initiate a social reconstruction that would transform southern slave society based on northern ideas of domesticity. Whether attempting to regulate federal relief, southern labor relations, apprenticeship laws and practices, or the administration of justice, the bureau endeavored to use the binary northern ideologies of free labor and domesticity to return former slaves to the workforce, to place freedmen at the head of black households, and to “teach” freedwomen to be the virtuous women, dutiful wives, and devoted mothers of true womanhood.

In the immediate post-emancipation South, the Freedmen's Bureau limited its federal relief activities to temporarily aiding former slaves and loyal white refugees with rations of food, clothing, fuel, and medical care. In doing so, it operated in the short term and worked to avert an immediate need rather than what some reformers recognized already as a long-term crisis of extraordinary times. Official relief policy charged bureau men in the field with instructing freedmen and women in the importance of free labor, self-reliance, and independence and distributing material relief only to “prevent starvation or extreme want”. However, the appeals of freedwomen for federal relief often represented some of the most troubling cases for bureau men at the ground level of Reconstruction. Indeed, many, if not most, of the requests for bureau aid came from women who faced “a weight of circumstances”.

Chapter 6 examines the Freedmen’s Bureau courts as an exception to the otherwise prevailing failure of conciliation courts to take root in American soil. Created to integrate the newly freed African-Americans into Southern society and to reconfigure the latter on free labor foundations, the Bureau courts were understood by Northern architects of Reconstruction to be a kind of conciliation court. Long promoted as able to attenuate market-driven conflict and restore communal harmony, the conciliation court seemed tailor-made for the Reconstruction South with its mounting tensions between white landowners and penniless, recently freed slaves. But the free labor values that Northerners viewed as self-evident truths that Bureau courts (qua conciliation courts) would simply help the parties to recognize were seen by white Southerners as foreign values, imposed on them by force. Appealing to the defense of adversarialism developed before the war, Southerners denounced the Bureau courts as un-American. With the Supreme Court’s decision in Ex parte Milligan (prohibiting military tribunals from trying civilians) and the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, their campaign to dismantle the Bureau courts and to preserve their racial supremacy would prove victorious. The restoration of adversarial justice would thereafter be framed as a triumph of due process.

Operating at best with a belief that freedmen and women required “a guardian rather than a jailor or hangman”, Freedmen's Bureau officials worked not only to defend the rights of African Americans against racial discriminations, but also to enforce the obligations of freedom as they mediated southern justice. To bureau men, dispensing justice meant in the end enforcing racial equality before the law and extending civil rights to African Americans rather than fighting gender discriminations. Thus as it mediated legal disputes involving freedpeople, the bureau again claimed the opportunity to impress upon former slaves the rights and obligations of free labor and contract as well as northern notions of household relations, an independent manhood, and a dependent womanhood. Freedwomen also used the bureau to intercede into their domestic relations when they became the target of abuse by husbands, filing complaints of domestic abuse including sexual violence.

Emancipation and the legal recognition of the African-American family that it conferred had granted, at least in theory, black parents the right to claim and control their own progeny. In some ways, black parents found that maintaining the integrity of their families in emancipation could be as difficult as it had been in slavery. In particular, the privileges that came with parenthood—that is, the right to custody and control of children—were far more difficult to secure. Perhaps the most serious threat to black families and African-American parental authority in the immediate post-emancipation era was the apprenticeship system. Yet black mothers also faced custody battles with freedmen who sought to assert their rights as free and independent men by claiming control over the lives and labors of their families. Clashes over freedchildren demonstrated the willingness of the Freedmen's Bureau to intervene in African Americans' lives in an effort to defend free labor and, with that, to prevent black parents from being “deprived of the services of their children”.

Chapter 4 explores the role the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (commonly referred to as the Freedmen’s Bureau) played in western North Carolina’s reconstruction. It may seem ironic that an agency tasked with aiding the adjustment from slavery to free labor was in the southern mountains, but the irony dissipates in light of the evidence. The Conservative Party’s resumption of local control in 1865 led white Unionists to embrace the Republican Party and black political cooperation two years later, a move that would have been impossible without the Freedmen’s Bureau. Its agents represented the most tangible source of federal power in the mountain counties, and as such helped build relationships between black and white mountaineers that allowed the Republicans to sweep the pivotal local and state elections of 1868.

Three African American healers—John Donalson of Austin, Texas, Moses Camplin of Charleston, South Carolina, and Alexander Augusta of Washington, D.C, wrote to the Freedmen's Bureau about their medical practices in 1865 and 1866 with the belief that the federal government might redress their grievances. This chapter undertakes a close reading of correspondence from and about these three disparate African American doctors. The diverse experiences they describe with local Bureau agents, municipal authorities, the white citizenry, and white doctors, as well with the black community and their patient bases, show the complicated relationship between freedom and black medical professionalism during emancipation.

In their efforts to transform the South into a free labor society, officials of the Freedmen's Bureau encountered an employment landscape complicated greatly by issues of gender. Reconstruction-era policy makers believed that both African-American men and women should remain active participants in the southern workforce. Emancipation had ended the obligation to labor for neither black men nor black women. As a result, the bureau's official stance on labor—permeated with both an insistence that freedom required employment and a formal refusal to provide relief to persons physically able to work—called for freedmen and women to continue working in the fields and households of the South. Indeed, the agency's free labor experiment depended on it. A complex labor situation seemed ready to thwart such policies, however. Labor supply and labor demand seemed uneven across the South. Complicating matters further, bureau men encountered a determination among African Americans to decide for themselves how, when, and where they would work.

With varying degrees of success, African-American women encountered, trusted, challenged, and used the Freedmen's Bureau in their efforts to shape the outcome of emancipation. These interactions did not come without consequence. With defiant words and actions, the freedwomen who complained to federal authorities, in the words of a local bureau official in Virginia in 1866, committed that “unpardonable sin”. Although to this agent, their complaints only served to “widen the breach between whites and blacks”, to the women who made them, they were part of what would become a lengthy battle to define and defend freedom, womanhood, and a newfound citizenship for African Americans on their own terms. Indeed, the very act of making a complaint—whatever the complaint—to the Freedmen's Bureau was a courageous political act in the age of emancipation. The interaction between the Freedmen's Bureau and freedwomen reveals the many ways in which both northern gender ideology and freedwomen themselves acted to shape the political culture of Reconstruction.

This chapter explores black Mobilians’ hard struggle for the African American education after Confederate defeat. Intense white opposition led by Josiah Nott, arson, and antagonisms with Creoles of Color threatened their goal of becoming a literate people. Black Mobilians overcame these challenges and proved that they were no longer slaves. By remaining steadfast in purpose, this chapter argues that black Mobilians and their partnerships with the Freedmen’s Bureau and American Missionary Association remade the postwar landscape to include the African American schoolhouse in Mobile and firmly embedded African American education as a state constitutional right of citizenship.

This chapter shows that deference to precedent and the early crystallization of the basic structure of the disaster narrative did not preclude innovation in what counted as a “disaster.” Instead, it defined the hurdles that a claimant had to overcome in order to be compensated as others had been in the past. In particular, a successful disaster story had to identify an entity or event that was wholly outside the control of the would-be victim, yet which was causally linked to an outcome intimately affecting his material condition. The chapter traces efforts to expand the role of the disaster relief precedent, beginning with its use to authorize the Freedmen's Bureau in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War through measures such as the effort to secure federal aid to education in the 1880, unemployment relief during the Depression of 1893, and federal farm loans during the first decades of the twentieth century.

This chapter studies the Civil War-era black migration to Worcester County, affording a rare glimpse into the lives and strategies of freedpeople, of black men, women, and children as they shaped and defined their own freedom. It notes that their stories show the way in which former slaves negotiated a new world of freedom, the strategies they employed, and the decision they made in an effort to ensure their liberty and that of family and friends whom they subsequently brought north. The chapter notes further that a comparison of migrants who came north through personal connections with missionaries and military personnel with those who came through the Freedmen's Bureau suggests the importance of patronage networks in facilitating opportunities for southern migrants.

Chapter 2 focuses on the period of the Civil War and Reconstruction, when formerly enslaved persons, classified as “contrabands” and refugees, were placed as domestic workers in northern households. The involvement of the Bureau of Freedmen, Refugees, and Abandoned Lands (the Freedmen’s Bureau) in the placement of refugees as servants prefigured the federal government’s expanded role as a broker of immigrant labor in the decades that followed, yet proved controversial. Designed to reduce government expenditures on the relief of refugees in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, the Freedmen’s Bureau’s financing of black servants’ migration was viewed with skepticism by detractors who claimed that it revived—under the thin veneer of “free” labor—a version of the slave trade. Due to insufficient federal funding, the reluctance of black refugees to relocate to uncertain job situations in the North, and constant questions about its efficacy, the Freedmen’s Bureau—after contracting thousands of women and children to service positions—was ultimately forced to disband this initiative.

Historians surely understand that the American state failed the freedpeople, but it is not clear that we understand why federal power failed them so badly, despite common explanations that focus upon a failure of intentionalities rooted in racism or free-labor ideology. By foregrounding efficacy, scholars can see anew the central role of state institutions in shaping the experience of Reconstruction and the extent and limits of emancipation. Grounding freedpeople's actions, not just in community building or ideological expression but in practical access to particular state functions, reminds us that emancipation was not solely a labor struggle or an ideological crucible. The rights freedpeople sought to defend had little meaning absent their attachment to a state powerful enough to make them felt. In a dualism too little appreciated in the literature, freedpeople were frequently most assertive in asking for help from above; their claims-and the claims of many relatively weaker people-were not isolated from but deeply intertwined with the need for support from government actors. Instead of operating in opposition, freedpeople's agency and state action were often mutually constructing.