Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867: Series 3, Volume 2: Land and Labor, 1866-1867

Chapter 7. Dependency and Relief

7 Dependency and Relief Of the many challenges that followed emancipation, providing for the indigent, the disabled, the orphaned, the aged, and the ill was among the most intractable. The upheaval of war and emancipation left unprecedented numbers of black and white Southerners destitute, while straining or eliminating altogether the forms of social provision that had prevailed during slavery. Before the war, slaveowners were re- DEPENDENCY AND RELIEF 709 sponsible for the welfare of their slaves, whatever their age and physical condition. Only free people were entitled to public relief, which local authorities generally dispensed with a miserly hand. Emancipation extinguished the owners’ obligation and greatly increased the free population that might require public provision. Meanwhile , wartime expenditures and economic collapse had drained the coffers of both state and local governments. In the war’s immediate aftermath, the federal government—acting through the army and the Freedmen’s Bureau—had responded to pressing need by providing food, medical care, and sometimes clothing and housing to thousands of freedpeople and white refugees. It had also, as a temporary measure, issued orders requiring former slaveholders to subsist and house those among their former slaves who were unable to work and had no relatives to support them. Once state and local governments assumed responsibility for dependent freedpeople as they did for white Southerners of the same condition, that obligation would end. In the wake of emancipation, black Southerners had also created their own modes of assistance, both individual and collective. Their resources, however, fell far short of the need. As civil governments regained power under President Andrew Johnson’s program of reconstruction, conflicts over the provision of relief thus merged with conflicts over the evolving labor system. Time and again, federal officials pressed state and local authorities to take up the burden, but their overtures were continually rebuffed, leaving the Freedmen’s Bureau to provide for former slaves and for significant numbers of white Southerners as well. Attempts by the bureau to reduce its role ran afoul of civil authorities’ intransigence, which in turn was exacerbated by the hard economic times that gripped the South.1 For freedpeople, the paths to indigence were many. The war had disconnected 1. In this essay, quotations and statements of fact that appear without footnotes are drawn from the documents included in the chapter. On dependency and relief in 1865, see Freedom, ser. 3, vol. 1: chap. 6. Secondary works concerning freedpeople and relief in 1866 and 1867 include George R. Bentley, A History of the Freedmen’s Bureau (1955; reprint, New York, 1974), pp. 76–79, 139–44; Paul A. Cimbala, The Freedmen’s Bureau: Reconstructing the American South after the Civil War (Malabar, Fla., 2005), chap. 4, and Under the Guardianship of the Nation: The Freedmen’s Bureau and the Reconstruction of Georgia, 1865–1870 (Athens,Ga., 1997), chap. 4; Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York, 2012), chaps. 3–6; Mary J. Farmer, “‘Because They Are Women’: Gender and the Virginia Freedmen’s Bureau’s ‘War on Dependency,’” in The Freedmen’s Bureau and Reconstruction: Reconsiderations, ed. Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller (New York, 1999), pp. 161–92; Mary Farmer-Kaiser, Freedwomen and the Freedmen’s Bureau: Race, Gender, and Public Policy in the Age of Emancipation (New York, 2010), chap. 2; Elna C. Green, This Business of Relief: Confronting Poverty in a Southern City, 1740–1940 (Athens, Ga., 2003), chap. 5; Robert Harrison, Washington during Civil War and Reconstruction: Race and Radicalism (New York, 2011), chap. 3; Howard N. Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865–1890 (Urbana, Ill., 1980), chap. 6. 710 DEPENDENCY AND RELIEF large numbers of former slaves from customary networks of support, often relocating them far from their old homes. Many such people had taken refuge at the “contraband camps” and “government farms” established in Union-occupied territory during the war and subsequently administered by the Freedmen’s Bureau. With the return of peace, the superintendents of these settlements pushed their residents to find employment, and few healthy men and women remained within their confines for long. Most ex-slaves in the camps, however, were people of no interest to employers—the elderly, the sick and disabled, children too young to work, and women with small children.2 If available at all, employment itself seldom lifted freedpeople far above the margin of subsistence...