The Freedmen’s Bureau and the Politics of Institutional Structure

On New Year’s Day in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the slaves in much of the South. Lincoln’s act transformed the Civil War from a sectional rebellion to a war of liberation. Although the proclamation’s immediate legal effect was minimal, since it touched only those areas still resisting Union authority, its political effect was far reaching and dramatic.

With a single stroke of his pen, Lincoln ensured that the Union victory would create a new class of citizens, the freedmen, numbering well over 3 million. Almost all of these new citizens were landless and destitute. Despite their new legal status, they were faced at the war’s end with a social structure that regarded them as inferior, treating them with contempt at best and with violent fury at worst.

In emancipating the slaves and overturning the economic and social basis of southern society, the federal government shouldered the responsibility of finishing what it had begun, making the freedmen citizens.