Freedmen's Bureau
Post-slavery federal office
The Freedmen's Bureau was a U.S. government agency established in 1865 to assist formerly enslaved people during Reconstruction.
It provided food, housing, medical aid, and education, and helped negotiate labor contracts between freedmen and former slaveholders.
Underfunded and politically opposed, it was dismantled by 1872.
The Freedmen's Bureau established over a thousand schools across the South.
- ReconstructionPost-1865 national reunification period
- emancipationRelease from legal bondage
- literacy programsInitiatives teaching reading skills
- Civil WarCountrymen fighting countrymen
- education reformEfforts to better schooling
land redistribution · broken promises · white supremacy · rations · labor contracts · Howard · field offices · federal oversight · forty acres · contraband · Thirteenth Amendment · Union Army · legal aid · orphan care · Fourteenth Amendment · sharecropping · manumission · Andrew Johnson
Freedmen's BureauKu Klux Klan
White supremacist hate organization
slave patrols · slave catchers · plantation system · chain gangs
Freedmen's BureauJim Crow laws
Post-Reconstruction racial separation statutes