Andrew Johnson Kicking Out the Freedmen's Bureau

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Andrew Johnson Kicking Out the Freedmen's Bureau

Editorial cartoon

Date: April 14, 1866

Source: Illustration by Thomas Nast, provided courtesy of HarpWeek.

Source: Thomas Nast (1840–1902) is the most famous political cartoonist in nineteenth-century American history. He worked for Harper's Weekly, one of the most-read magazines of the era, from 1861 to 1866.

INTRODUCTION

When President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation to free slaves in the Confederacy, he did not provide a way for them to make a living as free citizens. To ease the transition from slavery to freedom, Congress created the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, popularly known as the Freedmen's Bureau, on March 3, 1865.

The bureau had its roots in an 1865 proposal by Representative George Julian of Indiana and Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts to give freed slaves forty-acre homesteads carved out of Confederate lands taken under the Confiscation Act of 1862. More Southern lands were subsequently seized as abandoned under an 1864 law and for default on taxes levied by Congress early in the war. It made sense to many Radical Republicans [those who favored freedom, equality, and voting rights for blacks] to distribute these lands to former slaves to enable them to take care of themselves. Congress, however, refused to sanction any type of land redistribution, and Johnson, a former slave owner, pardoned a large number of Southern landowners and restored their property to them. As a result, the blacks were given land to rent, not own, in what became the sharecropping system.

The Freedmen's Bureau provided food, clothing, and transportation to freed blacks as well as to whites displaced by the war. It also set up schools, distributed lands, and attempted to monitor labor contracts (something new for both blacks and planters). The bureau had its own courts to deal with labor disputes and land titles, and its agents were further authorized to supervise trials involving blacks in other courts. Andrew Johnson, a former slave owner who became president upon Lincoln's assassination, opposed the Freedmen's Bureau throughout his brief term in office.

PRIMARY SOURCE

ANDREW JOHNSON KICKING OUT THE FREEDMEN'S BUREAU

Seeprimary source image.

SIGNIFICANCE

The Freedmen's Bureau suffered from poor leadership that drastically hampered its effectiveness. Oliver Otis Howard, the bureau's commissioner, was well meaning and sympathetic, as were a number of field agents. However, many regional and local officers were more concerned with gaining the approval of the white communities in which they worked than fulfilling the bureau's mission. They viewed their main responsibility as persuading former slaves to accept contracts with their former masters and preventing the blacks from drifting into towns. Additionally, some of the more dedicated officers who genuinely sought to help the African Americans were removed from office by Johnson.

The president's resistance to the Freedmen's Bureau and Reconstruction killed the agency. Johnson challenged Congress by vetoing a bill in 1866 that would have extended its life, arguing that it violated the Constitution because it made the federal government responsible for indigents, was passed by a Congress that denied seats to the eleven states of the Confederacy, and was vague in its definition of civil rights. At that time, Johnson still had sufficient clout to persuade the Senate to uphold his veto. After he attacked congressional leaders in a fiery speech, however, moderate Republicans began to abandon him. When Johnson vetoed a Civil Rights Act on the grounds that giving citizenship to native-born blacks went beyond the scope of federal power, Congress overrode his veto and enacted a revised Freedmen's Bureau bill on April 9, 1866. Relations between Johnson and Congress eventually become so poor that Johnson was nearly thrown out of office.

The battle over the bureau and lack of presidential support, however, left the agency severely weakened. In the four years of its existence, it fed about 4,000 people and educated many Southerners, but achieved little more. The Freedmen's Bureau was a temporary relief measure, yet it helped earn constitutional and legal rights for African Americans.