Hostname: page-component-7bb8b95d7b-qxsvm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-10-02T13:59:16.071Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Freedmen’s Bureau and the Politics of Institutional Structure

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Robert C. Lieberman
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

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.

Type
Articles
Information
Social Science History , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , Fall 1994 , pp. 405 - 437
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1994 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abbott, Martin (1967) The Freedmen’s Bureau in South Carolina, 1865–1872. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Beale, Howard K. (1930) The Critical Year: A Study of Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction. New York: Harcourt, Brace.Google Scholar
Beard, Charles A., and Beard, Mary R. (1927) The Rise of American Civilization. New York: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Bensel, Richard Franklin (1990) Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bentley, George R. (1949) “The political activity of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Florida.” Florida Historical Quarterly 28: 28–37.Google Scholar
Bentley, George R. (1955) A History of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Bethel, Elizabeth (1948) “The Freedmen’s Bureau in Alabama.” Journal of Southern History 14: 49–92.Google Scholar
BRFAL (U.S. Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands) (1865) Report of the Commissioner. 39th Cong., 1st sess., H. Exec. Doc. 11.Google Scholar
BRFAL (U.S. Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands) (1865–68) Reports of the Assistant Commissioners. Record Group 105 (microfilm). National Archives, Washington, DC.Google Scholar
BRFAL (U.S. Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands) (1865–70) Reports of the Education Division. Record Group 105 (microfilm). National Archives, Washington, DC.Google Scholar
BRFAL (U.S. Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands) (1866) Report of the Commissioner. 39th Cong., 2d sess., H. Exec. Doc. 1.Google Scholar
BRFAL (U.S. Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands) (1867) Report of the Commissioner. 40th Cong., 2d sess., H. Exec. Doc. 1.Google Scholar
BRFAL (U.S. Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands) (1868) Report of the Commissioner. 40th Cong., 3d sess., H. Exec. Doc. 1.Google Scholar
BRFAL (U.S. Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands) (1870) Report of the Commissioner. 41st Cong., 3d sess., H. Exec. Doc. 1.Google Scholar
Brock, W. R. (1963) An American Crisis: Congress and Reconstruction. London: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Bronson, Louis Henry (1970) “The Freedmen’s Bureau: A public policy analysis.” D.S.W. diss., University of Southern California.Google Scholar
Burgess, John W. (1902) Reconstruction and the Constitution. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.Google Scholar
Butchart, Ronald E. (1980) Northern Schools, Southern Blacks, and Reconstruction: Freedmen’s Education, 1862–1875. Westport, CT: Greenwood.Google Scholar
Carpenter, John A. (1964) Sword and Olive Branch: Oliver Otis Howard. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.Google Scholar
Colby, Ira C. (1985) “The Freedmen’s Bureau: From social welfare to segregation.” Phylon 46: 219–30.Google Scholar
Cox, John, and Cox, La Wanda (1953) “General O. O. Howard and the ‘misrepresented bureau.’” Journal of Southern History 19: 427–56.Google Scholar
Crouch, Barry A. (1992) The Freedmen’s Bureau and Black Texans. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Donald, David (1965) The Politics of Reconstruction, 1863–1867. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1901) “The Freedmen’s Bureau.” Atlantic, March: 354–65.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1935) Black Reconstruction: An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880. New York: Harcourt, Brace.Google Scholar
Dunning, William Archibald (1907) Reconstruction, Political and Economic, 1865–1877. New York: Harper and Brothers.Google Scholar
Finegold, Kenneth, and Skocpol, Theda (1982) “State capacity and economic intervention in the early New Deal.” Political Science Quarterly 97: 255–78.Google Scholar
Foner, Eric (1970) Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Foner, Eric (1983) Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
Foner, Eric (1988) Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Hartz, Louis (1955) The Liberal Tradition in America. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.Google Scholar
Howard, Oliver Otis (1971) Autobiography of Oliver Otis Howard. Vol. 2. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries.Google Scholar
Huntington, Samuel P. (1957) The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Hyman, Harold M. (1991) “Ulysses Grant I, emperor of America? Some civil-military continuities and strains of the Civil War and Reconstruction,” in Kohn, Richard H. (ed.) The United States Military under the Constitution of the United States, 1789–1989. New York: New York University Press: 175–92.Google Scholar
Jacobs, Lawrence R. (1992) “Institutions and culture: Health policy and public opinion in the U.S. and Britain.” World Politics 44:179–209.Google Scholar
Keller, Morton (1977) Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Keller, Morton (1988) “Social policy in nineteenth-century America,” in Critchlow, Donald T. and Hawley, Ellis W. (eds.) Federal Social Policy: The Historical Dimension. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press: 99–115.Google Scholar
Lijphart, Arend (1971) “Comparative politics and the comparative method.” American Political Science Review 65: 682–93.Google Scholar
McCormick, Richard L. (1986) “The party period and public policy: An exploratory hypothesis,” in The Party Period and Public Policy: American Politics from the Age of Jackson to the Progressive Era. New York: Oxford University Press: 197–227.Google Scholar
McFeely, William S. (1968) Yankee Stepfather: General O. O. Howard and the Freedmen. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
McKitrick, Eric L. (1960) Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
McKitrick, Eric L. (1975) “Party politics and the Union and Confederate war efforts,” in Chambers, William Nisbet and Burnham, Walter Dean (eds.) The American Party Systems: Stages of Political Development. 2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press: 117–51.Google Scholar
McPherson, James M. (1988) The Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
March, James G., and Olsen, Johan P. (1989) Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Moe, Terry M. (1984) “The new economics of organization.” American Journal of Political Science 28: 739–77.Google Scholar
Moe, Terry M. (1985) “The politicized presidency,” in Chubb, John E. and Peterson, Paul E. (eds.) The New Direction in American Politics. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution: 235–71.Google Scholar
Moe, Terry M. (1987) “Interests, institutions, and positive theory: The politics of the NLRB.” Studies in American Political Development 2: 236–99.Google Scholar
Moe, Terry M. (1989) “The politics of bureaucratic structure,” in Chubb, John E. and Peterson, Paul E. (eds.) Can the Government Govern? Washington, DC: Brookings Institution: 267–329.Google Scholar
Nieman, Donald G. (1979) To Set the Law in Motion: The Freedmen’s Bureau and the Legal Rights of Blacks, 1865–1868. Millwood, NY: KTO Press.Google Scholar
Olds, Victoria Marcus (1966) “The Freedmen’s Bureau as a social agency.” DS.W diss., Columbia University.Google Scholar
Oubre, Claude F. (1978) Forty Acres and a Mule: The Freedmen’s Bureau and Black Land Ownership. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
Peirce, Paul Skeels (1904) The Freedmen’s Bureau: A Chapter in Reconstruction History. Iowa City: State University of Iowa.Google Scholar
Quadagno, Jill (1988) The Transformation of Old Age Security: Class and Politics in the American Welfare State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Ransom, Roger L., and Sutch, Richard (1977) One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Richter, William L. (1991) Overreached on All Sides: The Freedmen’s Bureau Administrators in Texas, 1865–1868. College Station: Texas A&M University Press.Google Scholar
Riddleberger, Patrick W. (1979) 1866: The Critical Year Revisited. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.Google Scholar
Rose, Willie Lee (1964) Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.Google Scholar
Skelton, William B. (1987) “The army officer as organization man,” in Ryan, Garry D. and Nenninger, Timothy K. (eds.) Soldiers and Civilians: The U.S. Army and the American People. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration: 61–70.Google Scholar
Skocpol, Theda, and Somers, Margaret (1980) “The uses of comparative history in macrosocial inquiry.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 22: 174–97.Google Scholar
Skowronek, Steven (1982) Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Stampp, Kenneth M. (1965) The Era of Reconstruction, 1865–1877. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.Google Scholar
Valelly, Richard M. (1993) “Party, coercion, and inclusion: The two reconstructions of the South’s electoral politics.” Politics and Society 21: 37–67.Google Scholar
White, Howard (1970) The Freedmen’s Bureau in Louisiana. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
White, Leonard D. (1948) The Federalists: A Study in Administrative History. New York: Macmillan.Google Scholar
White, Leonard D. (1951) The Jeffersonians: A Study in Administrative History, 1801–1829. New York: Macmillan.Google Scholar
White, Leonard D. (1956) The Jacksonians: A Study in Administrative History, 1829–1861. New York: Macmillan.Google Scholar
White, Leonard D. (1958) The Republican Era, 1869–1901: A Study in Administrative History. New York: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Wilson, James Q. (1989) Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Woodman, Harold D. (1987) “Economic reconstruction and the rise of the new South,” in Boles, John B. and Nolen, Evelyn Thomas (eds.) Interpreting Southern History: Historiographical Essays in Honor of Sanford W. Higginbotham. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press: 254–307.Google Scholar
Woodward, C. Vann (1951) The Origins of the New South, 1877–1913. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
Woodward, C. Vann (1974) The Strange Career of Jim Crow. 3d rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar