Too Great a Burden to Bear: The Struggle and Failure of the Freedmen's Bureau in Texas by Christopher S. Bean (review)

Christopher S. Bean's purpose is to explore the Freedmen's Bureau's role in Reconstruction from the bottom up. To that end, he focuses on the bureau's lowest-level agents, the subassistant commissioners (SACs), in Texas, whose jurisdictions each spanned one to several counties.

SACs were all men, overwhelmingly white (only one African American among 239 SACs in Texas), predominantly northerners and former Union officers, and mostly middle-class. Throughout the Freedmen's Bureau'sbrief existence the typical agent was undertrained, underpaid, poorly protected, and miserly supplied and funded, but overworked, oversupervised, and overwhelmed. Founding legislation was vague about the bureau's purpose beyond the grand goals of preventing another war, of reestablishing democracy in the South, and above all, of facilitating the freedpeople's transition from slavery to freedom. Bureau chief Oliver Otis Howard provided little further guidance to his agents, preferring decentralization wherein experimentation and ideas might flourish.

Most agents first focused on developing a system of free labor that would provide for the freedpeople's welfare and get the economy back on its feet. They wrote and approved wage labor contracts between workers and planters. Their next task was to enforce those contracts through Freedmen's Bureau courts that sprang up across the state. Over time their duties expanded to superintending schools, caring for indigents, registering voters, and even establishing marriage and family systems.

The foremost obstacle to their efforts was white resistance to any improvement in the freedpeople's lot. Agents regularly faced threats of violence against themselves and the formerly enslaved. Texas courts often refused to enforce new civil rights legislation, forcing bureau agents to overturn their verdicts, sometimes jailing white men or freeing former slaves. President Andrew Johnson's lenience toward former Confederates empowered recalcitrant whites, but the onset of Congressional Reconstruction only caused white resistance to increase. Many agents requested the protection of the dwindling U.S. Army, which had few troops to spare. Several agents died at the hands of outlaws and resisters.

Steeped in Reconstruction historiography, Bean's work aims to replace stereotypes of agents as either occupying carpetbaggers or corrupt and colluding oppressors of freedpeople. He finds that most agents entered Freedmen's Bureau service with noble intentions of lifting freedpeople out of bondage and degradation, but failed while laboring valiantly against long odds and white Texan intransigence. For example, where previous historians have found the bureau and its agents responsible for the rise of sharecropping and debt peonage, Bean argues that the bureau enforced wage contracts until the popularity of sharecropping among workers and planters alike defeated SACs' efforts. Further, Bean finds that SACs' voter registration efforts, done while Texas was creating a new constitution, placed the agents squarely in the ranks of the Republican Party. Bureau agents could not avoid partisanship, which further antagonized conservative Texans.

Explaining its ultimate failure, Bean notes that the Freedmen'sBureau "was temporary, its demise being 'preordained at its conception'" (p. 177). He leaves unexplored the reasons for this short life or for its effect in Texas. While Bean calculates the differences in average lengths of SAC tenures under one Texas bureau head or another, he makes only passing mention that the overall average, 7.8 months, was simply too short to allow these men to comprehend the complexities of their missions and constituencies. Bean argues that "[l]eaders failed to anticipate the extent of white resistance to Reconstruction" and that no amount of military pressure would have changed the result (p. 178). But the federal government never tested that possibility, and the reader is left to wonder what might have been had the nation mustered the political will to sustain the Freedmen's Bureau's mission longer than seven years.