Freedmen's Bureau Analysis

Many Southerner’s believed that slaves were okay with being held in captivity, since that was all they ever knew. That could be farther from the truth. In fact, many slaves believed the President Lincoln took far too long with his efforts to end slavery. This is because ending slavery was not something Lincoln wanted to do even though it was the only ethically and morally correct thing to do. He feared that abolishing slavery would make some Union states turn to the Confederate. The text states, “By the summer of 1862, however, the slaves themselves had pushed the issue, heading by the thousands to the Union lines as Lincoln’s troops marched through the South. Their actions debunked one of the strongest myths underlying Southern devotion to
The Freedmen’s Bureau was an agency created by Congress to help and protect those newly freed find jobs, homes, education, and a better life as a part of the Reconstruction era. In short, it had high hopes, but it didn’t really work. It had both its good and bad. One of the most powerful things that came as a direct result of the Freedmen Bureau was the election of Blacks to Congress. As a hope to rebuild the South, the Freedmen Bureau also assisted Whites in need. It did however build up the Black community, typically through churches which acted as hub for most things. Also, black and white teachers came to the South to teach. Economically, Blacks didn’t gain much. Most became sharecroppers, so they basically just went back to working for the Whites. Although it meant well, the Freedmen’s Bureau had its fault. First, they never had enough help or money to fulfill all the things they wanted to accomplish. The Freedmen's Bureau was given huge responsibilities, including education, mediating labor contracts, obtaining land, and settling criminal disputes. Also, staff members frequently held racist views of Blacks. As far as schools and teachers, White did not like that. White southerners were angered by their loss during the Civil War, blacks having their freedom, so they turned to violence. School were burned down, and teachers were killed. The Freedom’s Bureau eventhough it wanted to do good helped give birth to the KKK. In a passage read it states, “Many Southern whites could not accept the idea that former slaves could not only vote but hold office. It was in this era that the Ku Klux Klan was born. A reign of terror was aimed both at local Republican leaders as well as at blacks seeking to assert their new political rights. “Beatings, lynching, and massacres, were all in a night's work for the clandestine Klan” (ushistory.org, 2018). Eventually the Freedom Bureau was done away