The Freedmen's Bureau and Local Black Leadership

Abstract

The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, a branch of the United States War Department commonly known as the Freedmen's Bureau, was designed to help former slaves make the transition from slavery to freedom after the Civil War. It was the federal agency most directly involved with the black folk of the old Confederacy; as such it has received close scrutiny from scholars, and it has been the object of considerable pulling and tugging by various historical schools of thought in the last several decades. Since the mid-1950s, the agency has been interpreted by many revisionist scholars as a kind-hearted and generally successful attempt to provide needed assistance to black Americans and to introduce them to the American political process; in the 1970s, postrevisionist writers began to reassess the bureau as reactionary, paternalistic, and too concerned with establishing and maintaining close ties to the white southern establishment to make a substantial difference in the lives of the freedmen.' Many facets of the bureau's operations have been studied in the last four decades. Its dealings with the emerging class of black political leaders in the countryside and towns of the South, however, have not been examined as fully as some other aspects of its history, primarily because relatively little scholarly research has been devoted to group studies of African-American leaders on the local and county levels.2 Among the mountains of Freedmen's Bureau records, one set of documents does provide a glimpse of the bureau's relationship with localand county-level black leadership