A More Perfect Union? 1865-77 » The Freedmen's Bureau and the Black Codes

Freedom with nothing else

By 1865 about four million enslaved people in the South were free. But they had no land, little money, almost no schools and no say in government. Many white Southerners were angry and bitter after defeat. This lesson looks at what was done to help freed people, and how white Southerners pushed back. Remember, Reconstruction means the years after the Civil War when the North and South argued over how to bring the Southern states back into the Union and rebuild the South.

Key terms:

• Freedmen's Bureau: a government agency set up in March 1865 to help freed people (and some poor white Southerners) in the South. Its full name was the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands.
• Freedpeople: men and women who had been freed from slavery.
• Black Codes: laws passed by Southern states in 1865-66 that limited the freedom of black people.
• Vagrancy: having no job or home. Under the Black Codes, a black person without work could be arrested.
• Sharecropping: a system where a farmer rents land and pays the landowner with a share of the crop instead of money.
• Ku Klux Klan: a secret group of white Southerners who used violence and terror against black people and their supporters.

The Freedmen's Bureau

Congress created the Freedmen's Bureau on 3 March 1865, before the war had even ended. It was run by the army under General Oliver O. Howard. It was supposed to last one year, but Congress extended it in 1866 over President Johnson's veto, and it closed in 1872. It never had many staff: fewer than 1,000 agents for the whole South.

Freed people hoped for land of their own. In January 1865 General Sherman had set aside land on the coast of Georgia and South Carolina for them, which gave rise to the promise of "forty acres and a mule". But President Johnson pardoned the owners, and the Bureau had to give most of the land back. Most freed people stayed landless.

Black voters and office-holders

After the Reconstruction Act of 1867 (see the lesson on Andrew Johnson and the Reconstruction Act of 1867), black men in the South could vote for the first time. They voted in large numbers, usually for the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln and of emancipation (freeing the enslaved). Some stood for office themselves.

• Black delegates helped to write the new state constitutions of 1867-68. These set up public schools in the South for the first time.
• Hundreds of black men sat in Southern state legislatures. In South Carolina, black members were a majority in the state House of Representatives.
• In 1870 Hiram Revels of Mississippi became the first black member of the US Senate. About sixteen black men served in Congress during Reconstruction.

White Southern Democrats attacked these governments, calling their members unfit to rule. In fact, black office-holders were a small part of the story: most Southern officials stayed white.

The Southern response: Black Codes

In 1865-66 the all-white state legislatures (the law-making bodies of each state), which Johnson's lenient (gentle) plan had left in charge, passed the Black Codes. Mississippi and South Carolina were among the first. The codes gave black people a few new rights, such as legal marriage, but their main aim was to control them as workers.

• Vagrancy laws: a black person without a job could be arrested, fined, and then hired out to an employer to pay it off.
• Labour contracts: workers had to sign a contract for a year, and a worker who left early could lose their wages.
• Apprenticeship laws: (making young people work for an employer) black children could be handed to white employers to work without pay.
• Other limits: black people could not own guns, in some places could not rent farmland, and could not give evidence against whites in court.

Many Northerners were outraged. It looked as if the South was bringing slavery back under another name. This anger helped the Republicans in the 1866 elections and led Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act (see the lesson on the Civil Rights Acts and the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments).

Sharecropping

Planters had land but no money to pay wages. Freed people had no land but wanted to work for themselves rather than in gangs. The result was sharecropping. A family farmed a small plot and gave the landowner a share of the crop, often half. The landowner or a local store lent them seed, tools and food on credit, with high prices. After a poor harvest the family was in debt and could not leave. For many, sharecropping tied them to the land almost as firmly as slavery, although they could not be bought or sold.

The Ku Klux Klan

The Klan began in Tennessee in 1865-66 as a club of Confederate veterans. It soon became a terror group across the South. Members wore robes and hoods and rode at night. They whipped, burned and murdered. Their targets were black voters, black landowners, teachers and Republican officials, whether black or white. The aim was to frighten black people away from the voting booth and to bring back white Democrat control of the South. Klan violence worked in many areas: black people stayed home on election day, afraid for their lives.

Change and continuity

This lesson links to the unit's themes of the issue of slavery and the role of government policy. What changed was dramatic: black Southerners were free, went to school and voted. What stayed the same was white control of land and work, helped by the Black Codes, sharecropping and terror. The Freedmen's Bureau was too small and too short-lived to change that.

Exam-style question

Explain two causes of the Black Codes being passed in the Southern states in 1865-66. [8 marks]

Remember: one cause alone cannot score more than half marks. For each cause, name it, give precise facts, and show how it led to the Black Codes.