The forthcoming article “America’s most “far-reaching institution”: The work and legacies of the Freedmen’s Bureau” by Michael Albertus and Jon Rogowski is summarized by the author(s) below.
The Confederacy’s surrender in the US Civil War inaugurated what historian Eric Foner has called the country’s “second founding.” Not only did the end of the war bring about new constitutional rights for Black Americans, but the Union’s victory in a war fought over slavery also raised new questions about how to protect those rights for four million newly emancipated Black people. A coalition of politically motivated Republicans and voluntary associations turned to bureaucracy as the answer. The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands—more commonly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau—represented an historic use of federal power to intervene in local communities during peacetime.
We evaluate the effectiveness of the Freedmen’s Bureau in fulfilling its mission in the short term and over the longer run. Though the Freedmen’s Bureau was the country’s first large-scale federal social program, little scholarship examines how the Bureau affected socioeconomic conditions, whether for emancipated Blacks or for poor Whites that had become destitute during the war. We highlight several mechanisms through which the Bureau improved socioeconomic outcomes: by providing education and medical services and support in negotiating labor contracts, and by stimulating administrative changes in local governance.
We created an original dataset on office locations and personnel based on a comprehensive search through the Freedmen’s Bureau archival records. This dataset provides the most complete picture to date of the Bureau’s presence and operation across the South, showing that the Bureau’s operations were more widespread than documented by previous research. We then linked these records to individual-level Census data on socioeconomic outcomes. And we matched Bureau and non-Bureau counties on a series of pre-war factors associated with office placement to estimate the effects of Freedmen’s Bureau offices on outcomes.
Our research shows that the Bureau had positive effects for both Black and White residents of counties that hosted offices. In 1880, the first census after the Bureau ceased operations, both Black and White individuals living in counties that had had field office locations had higher socioeconomic status. Black children also attended school at higher rates and Black population health was better. We attribute this to both the direct interventions of the Bureau and the creation of local institutions that ultimately passed to county administration.
The effects we document persisted for decades. The positive association between field office locations and socioeconomic status continued well into the early 1900s, though the magnitude attenuated across time for Blacks but increased for Whites as Jim Crow deepened and local government increasingly oriented policy benefits toward Whites.
In providing new evidence about the efficacy of state-based social welfare programs, the results suggest that the nineteenth-century American state had greater capacity than conventional accounts indicate. Local Freedmen’s Bureau offices served an impressive volume of Black and White residents despite local political opposition and limited financial resources, and these services produced long-lived consequences. The limited size of the administrative state likely reflected political opposition to federal government rather than an inherent weakness of bureaucratic institutions to perform tasks assigned to them.
About the Author(s): Michael Albertus is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago and Jon Rogowski is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Their research “America’s most “far-reaching institution”: The work and legacies of the Freedmen’s Bureau” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.