![]() ![]() They created the precedents.”įrom the start, the Bureau faced resistance from a variety of sources, including many white Southerners. “Congress and the army and the Freedmen’s Bureau were groping in the dark. “There was no tradition of government responsibility for a huge refugee population and no bureaucracy to administer a large welfare, employment and land reform program,” according to The Freedmen’s Bureau and Reconstruction, edited by Paul Cimbala and Randall Miller. ReconstructionĪmerica’s Reconstruction era was a turbulent time, as the nation struggled with how to rebuild the South and transition the 4 million newly freed Blacks from slavery to a free-labor society. Military Academy at West Point, reportedly had been planning to become a minister when the Civil War broke out.ĭuring the war, Howard, nicknamed the “Christian General,” fought in major battles, including Antietam and Gettysburg, and lost an arm in the Battle of Fair Oaks in 1862. Howard, a Maine native who attended Bowdoin College and the U.S. ![]() Oliver Otis Howard, a Union general, was appointed commissioner of the bureau in May 1865. He served as the university's president from 1869 to 1874. Intended as a temporary agency to last the duration of the war and one year afterward, the bureau was placed under the authority of the War Department and the majority of its original employees were Civil War soldiers.ĭid you know? Howard University, a historically all-Black school in Washington, D.C., was established in 1867 and named for Oliver Howard, one of its founders and the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, effectively ending the Civil War. Lee surrendered to the Union’s Ulysses S. The Freedmen’s Bureau was established by an act of Congress on March 3, 1865, two months before Confederate General Robert E. ![]()
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