A Failure of Vision: The Collapse of the Freedmen's Bureau Courts

A FAILURE OF VISION: The Collapse of the Freedmen's Bureau Courts James Oakes Nothing more clearly demonstrates the tragic failure of the Freedmen's Bureau than its ultimately futile efforts to establish equal justice in the South. Instituted in March, 1865 by act of Congress, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands had been assigned to provide for the immediate relief of freedmen and refugees, oversee the transition from a slave to a free-labor system, set up an educational system for the former slaves, and establish equal justice in the South. It was an enormous burden and the Freedmen's Bureau never really received the support itneeded to do the work expected of it. But it is worth noting that in the legislation which created the Bureau, the establishment of justice occupied a more prominent space than the education and labor systems that were to be devised. Without equal justice, it was reasoned, education was meaningless and free labor a farce.1 The essence of the tragedy lay in the limited ideological framework of those who set about consciously to reconstruct Southern society in the wake of civil war. General Oliver Otis Howard, Commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau from its inception in 1865 through its demise three years later, was a deeply religious New Englander, educated at the best schools and trained as a professional soldier at West Point. The men he chose as his assistant commissioners were of a similar background and included among them a distinguished general, a lawyer, a doctor, a preacher and a businessman. Of about a dozen assistant commissioners, all but one were Northerners; only three had not gone to college; only one was not native born, and all were Protestant. It would not be 1 The best general works on the Freedmen's Bureau are Ceorge Bentley, History of the Freedmen's Bureau (New York, 1955); John H. and Lawanda Cox, "Cenerai O. O. Howard and the 'Misrepresented Bureau,' " Journal of Southern History, XIX (1953), 427456 ; and William S. McFeely, Yankee Stepfather: General O. O. Howard and the Freedmen (New Haven, 1968). The author wishes to acknowledge the generous guidance of Leon Litwack, and the helpful criticism of Kenneth Stampp and James Kettner. Civil War History, Vol. XXV, No. 1 Copyright © 1979 by The Kent State University Press 0009-8078/79/2501-0004 $00.55/0 FREEDMENs's BUREAU COURTS67 inaccurate to describe the commissioners of the Freedmen's Bureau as quintessential^ representative of the Northern middle class.2 An understanding of the efforts of these men in Reconstruction requires an examination of the middle-class ideology which motivated them. These were fundamentally patriotic men, convinced of the greatness of American liberal democracy. They saw in the United States a land of equal opportunity, social mobility and political freedom, and nothing in their experience prepared them to believe that their ideas were unsuited to the post-bellum South. Their optimistic vision of the precise, clock-like mechanism of a free and open society sustained them through a civil war which many of them saw as a crusade to preserve the values which had made Northern society great. It was a fine and noble vision—a political framework based on a society deemed worthy of emulation, and an ideology which, to its everlasting credit, had enhanced the anti-slavery potential of Northern public opinion in the years preceding the Civil War. But it was also a flawed vision, tinged with chauvinism, founded upon an America that had become an anachronism, blinded to social realities and bankrupt of alternatives when calamity seemed so apparent.3 Few things stand out as positively in the records of the Freedmen's Bureau as the commitment of its agents to the principle of equal justice under law. The commissioners believed that no law should discriminate between those of a different race, and that all should be subject to the same laws. "It is the easiest and best way possible," General Howard wrote, "to solve every troublesome problem proposed, relating to negroes, by the time-honored rules established by wise legislation for other people." Guided by this doctrine, the Freedmen's Bureau set as its goal the...