Welfare and Employment Policies of the Freedmen's Bureau in the District of Columbia

ON JULY 1, 1865, "THE BUREAU OF REFUGEES, FREEDMEN, AND ABANDONED Lands (Freedmen's Bureau) opened a local office in Washington, D.C. In doing so, an agency that had been created to manage the transition from slavery to freedom in the states of the former Confederacy began to operate in the capital of the Union. General Oliver Otis Howard, the commissioner of the bureau, later recalled that he confronted "such an accumulation of subjects relating to the District of Columbia" that he had to appoint an assistant commissioner to take charge there. (1) Although the District had contained only 3,185 slaves in 1860, its freed population was greatly swollen by an influx of fugitives, commonly known as "contrabands," from neighboring counties in Maryland and Virginia. In consequence, the total African American population of the District increased from 14,316 in 1860 to 38,663 in 1867. At least two-thirds were recent migrants unfamiliar with urban life and the workings of an urban economy. (2) Irregularly employed and dependent for much of the year on public or private charity, many of the newcomers lived in conditions of extreme destitution, inhabiting overcrowded tenements and dilapidated shanties on the fringes of the city or in neighborhoods like the so-called Murder Bay, on the site of the present-day Federal Triangle. (3) It was the size and living conditions of Washington's contraband population and the unwelcoming attitude of local residents and municipal authorities that made the presence of the Freedmen's Bureau seem necessary. (4) In response to the unemployment, overcrowding, and poverty that confronted African Americans in the nation's capital, the bureau initiated ambitious projects that went far beyond the normal limits of state power in nineteenth-century America. Besides its characteristic emphasis on education and relief, the bureau instituted an extensive program of sanitation and public housing and, most strikingly, a massive project to relocate unemployed workers to other parts of the Union, including several northern states that were unaccustomed to receiving large-scale black migration. The relocation project clearly illustrates both the agency's capacity for vigorous social action and the conservative ends to which that action was sometimes put. The last two decades have seen a welcome efflorescence of historical interest in the Freedmen's Bureau. A cluster of detailed local studies has explored the diverse social and political circumstances in which the bureau operated, the differing strategies and assumptions of its agents, and the complex interactions among bureau personnel, freed-people, and white southerners. A previous generation of so-called post-revisionist historians, writing during the late 1960s and 1970s, had focused on the bureau's limitations, pointing out that its personnel failed to subscribe to late-twentieth-century standards of racial justice. The "New Freedmen's Bureau Historiography" of the last twenty years offers a more balanced interpretation that acknowledges the elements of paternalism and prejudice that animated bureau officials and the legal and practical constraints under which they worked but nonetheless recognizes their assistance to former slaves in negotiating the transition from bondage to freedom. "Considering the obstacles of racism, southerners' distrust of outsiders, the temporary status of the bureau as an agency, the bureau's limited resources, the lack of a significant military presence to support the bureau, among a host of constraints, it is a wonder the Bureau succeeded at all," observe the editors of a recent collection of essays. For all its weaknesses, "the Bureau altered the assumptions and calculus of local power and race relations" in communities all over the South and prevented the former ruling class from claiming "complete economic and social power" over blacks. (5) This research has focused primarily on the rural South, where the great majority of freedpeople lived. …