The Freedmen's Bureau and Reconstruction PDF Download

Author: Paul Alan Cimbala
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN:
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 408

View

Book Description
They offer insight into the actions and thoughts, not only of the agents, but also of the southern planters and the former slaves, as both of these groups learned how to deal with new responsibilities, new advantages, and altered relationships."--BOOK JACKET.

Author: George R. Bentley
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512814334
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

View

Book Description
This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

Author: Mary Farmer-Kaiser
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823232115
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

View

Book Description
Established by congress in early 1865, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands--more commonly known as "the Freedmen's Bureau"--assumed the Herculean task of overseeing the transition from slavery to freedom in the post-Civil War South. Although it was called the Freedmen's Bureau, the agency profoundly affected African-American women. Until now remarkably little has been written about the relationship between black women and this federal government agency. As Mary Farmer-Kaiser clearly demonstrates in this revealing work, by failing to recognize freedwomen as active agents of change and overlooking the gendered assumptions at work in Bureau efforts, scholars have ultimately failed to understand fully the Bureau's relationships with freedwomen, freedmen, and black communities in this pivotal era of American history.

Author: William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789070360214
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 23

View

Book Description

Author: Christopher B. Bean
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823268764
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 492

View

Book Description
This Reconstruction Era historical study of the Freedman’s Bureau in Texas offers a personal view of the lives, struggles and misconceptions of its agents. Formed at the close of the Civil War to provide assistance to formerly enslaved people, the Freedmen’s Bureau became the epicenter of the debate about Reconstruction. Though its agents in Texas were vitally important, historians have only recently begun to focus on their operations. Specifically addressing the historiographical debates concerning the character of the Bureau and its sub-assistant commissioners (SACs), Too Great a Burden to Bear sheds new light on the work and reputation of these agents. Focusing on the agents on a personal level, author Christopher B. Bean reveals the type of man Bureau officials believed qualified to oversee the Freedpeople’s transition to freedom. This work shows that each agent, moved by his sense of fairness and ideas of citizenship, gender, and labor, represented the agency’s policy in his subdistrict. These men further ensured the Freedpeople’s right to an education and right of mobility, rights fiercely contested by many in the South.

Author: Jim Downs
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199911541
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 279

View

Book Description
Bondspeople who fled from slavery during and after the Civil War did not expect that their flight toward freedom would lead to sickness, disease, suffering, and death. But the war produced the largest biological crisis of the nineteenth century, and as historian Jim Downs reveals in this groundbreaking volume, it had deadly consequences for hundreds of thousands of freed people. In Sick from Freedom, Downs recovers the untold story of one of the bitterest ironies in American history--that the emancipation of the slaves, seen as one of the great turning points in U.S. history, had devastating consequences for innumerable freed people. Drawing on massive new research into the records of the Medical Division of the Freedmen's Bureau-a nascent national health system that cared for more than one million freed slaves-he shows how the collapse of the plantation economy released a plague of lethal diseases. With emancipation, African Americans seized the chance to move, migrating as never before. But in their journey to freedom, they also encountered yellow fever, smallpox, cholera, dysentery, malnutrition, and exposure. To address this crisis, the Medical Division hired more than 120 physicians, establishing some forty underfinanced and understaffed hospitals scattered throughout the South, largely in response to medical emergencies. Downs shows that the goal of the Medical Division was to promote a healthy workforce, an aim which often excluded a wide range of freedpeople, including women, the elderly, the physically disabled, and children. Downs concludes by tracing how the Reconstruction policy was then implemented in the American West, where it was disastrously applied to Native Americans. The widespread medical calamity sparked by emancipation is an overlooked episode of the Civil War and its aftermath, poignantly revealed in Sick from Freedom.

Author: Paul A. Cimbala
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820325118
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 442

View

Book Description
The Freedmen's Bureau was an extraordinary agency established by Congress in 1865, born of the expansion of federal power during the Civil War and the Union's desire to protect and provide for the South's emancipated slaves. Charged with the mandate to change the southern racial "status quo" in education, civil rights, and labor, the Bureau was in a position to play a crucial role in the implementation of Reconstruction policy. The ineffectiveness of the Bureau in Georgia and other southern states has often been blamed on the racism of its northern administrators, but Paul A. Cimbala finds the explanation to be much more complex. In this remarkably balanced account, he blames the failure on a combination of the Bureau's northern free-labor ideology, limited resources, and temporary nature--as well as deeply rooted white southern hostility toward change. Because of these factors, the Bureau in practice left freedpeople and ex-masters to create their own new social, political, and economic arrangements.

Author: William A. Blair
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469663465
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 182

View

Book Description
After the Civil War's end, reports surged of violence by Southern whites against Union troops and Black men, women, and children. While some in Washington, D.C., sought to downplay the growing evidence of atrocities, in September 1866, Freedmen's Bureau commissioner O. O. Howard requested that assistant commissioners in the readmitted states compile reports of "murders and outrages" to catalog the extent of violence, to prove that the reports of a peaceful South were wrong, and to argue in Congress for the necessity of martial law. What ensued was one of the most fascinating and least understood fights of the Reconstruction era—a political and analytical fight over information and its validity, with implications that dealt in life and death. Here William A. Blair takes the full measure of the bureau's attempt to document and deploy hard information about the reality of the violence that Black communities endured in the wake of Emancipation. Blair uses the accounts of far-flung Freedmen's Bureau agents to ask questions about the early days of Reconstruction, which are surprisingly resonant with the present day: How do you prove something happened in a highly partisan atmosphere where the credibility of information is constantly challenged? And what form should that information take to be considered as fact?

Author: Barry A. Crouch
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 9780292712195
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220

View

Book Description
Fascinating stories of enormous human interest from case studies illustrate both the need for and the effectiveness of the Freedmen's Bureau in Texas. Established by Congress in 1865 to help newly emancipated blacks make the transition from slavery to freedom, the Freedmen's Bureau is considered the first social welfare agency in American history. How effectively the Bureau carried out its mission, however, has long been a subject of debate. In this revisionist study of the Bureau's operations in Texas, Barry A. Crouch challenges traditional views that the Bureau was ineffective and asserts that its agents actually made considerable--and often successful--attempts to assist black Texans. Drawing on a wealth of previously unused documentation in the National Archives, Crouch offers new insights into the workings of the Bureau and the difficulties faced by Texas Bureau officials, who served in a remote and somewhat isolated area with little support from headquarters. Particularly interesting is the case of William G. Kirkman, a conscientious agent who was assassinated for his efforts to help black workers in Boston, Texas. While the Freedmen's Bureau ultimately achieved no lasting success in Texas or elsewhere, Crouch finds that it did not hinder the cause of freed people, as some critics have claimed. Operating during Reconstruction when whites were hostile toward Union efforts to enforce laws protecting blacks, the Bureau helped many individual former slaves and provided a forum where black Texans could assert their legal rights as citizens and free laborers. Of interest to all students of African-American history and of the Reconstruction period in Texas, The Freedmens Bureau and Black Texans is one of only three state studies of the Bureau published in recent years and the first book-length examination of the Bureau in Texas.

Author: Paul Alan Cimbala
Publisher: Krieger Publishing Company
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

View

Book Description
The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, better known as the Freedmen's Bureau, was established in the spring of 1865 to help white and black Southerners make the transition from slavery to freedom, while securing the basic civil rights of the ex-slaves. It failed to accomplish what its creators had hoped, but its history tells us much about why Northerners and Southerners, whites and blacks, approached Reconstruction in the way that they did and why that failure occurred. The Freedmen's Bureau: Reconstructing the American South after the Civil War is a succinct summary of the agency's history accompanied by key documents that illustrate Northern ideology, black expectations, and white Southern resistance. Topics of the day, including labor, education, violence, politics, and justice place the federal agency within the larger context of post-Civil War history.