The federal agency created in March 1865 to aid freedpeople and white refugees in the postwar South with relief, labor contracts, schools, and land.
The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, was established in the War Department by an act of Congress on 3 March 1865. In May 1865 President Andrew Johnson appointed Major General Oliver Otis Howard its commissioner. Congress charged the agency with providing food, shelter, clothing, medical services, and land to people displaced by the war, above all the roughly four million African Americans newly freed from slavery.
Its work reached into nearly every part of freed people’s lives. Bureau agents issued rations, operated hospitals and camps, supervised labor contracts between freedpeople and planters, heard complaints and apprenticeship disputes, helped couples formalize marriages, and helped families separated by slavery find one another. The Bureau also assisted the benevolent societies that founded schools for freedpeople across the South, part of the movement that produced many of today’s historically Black colleges and universities. Later it helped Black veterans claim the military pay they were owed.
The Bureau was politically embattled from the start. Its original charter ran only for the war and one year after. President Johnson vetoed an extension on 19 February 1866; Congress passed a revised bill over a second veto, and it became law on 16 July 1866, extending the agency for two more years. Johnson’s pardons of former Confederates also forced the return of land the Bureau might have settled with freedpeople (see forty acres and a mule). The bulk of its work was done between June 1865 and December 1868, and the Bureau was discontinued in 1872.
The Bureau’s records, held by the National Archives as Record Group 105, are among the richest sources for the history of emancipation and for African American genealogy. They are digitized and searchable through FamilySearch and the National Archives Catalog. See our family history guide.
See also: Forty Acres and a Mule, Reconstruction, Black Codes, Emancipation, HBCU (Historically Black College or University)
Sources
- National Archives, “The Freedmen’s Bureau.” Link
- U.S. Senate Historical Office, “Freedmen’s Bureau Acts of 1865 and 1866.” Link
- New Georgia Encyclopedia, “Sherman’s Field Order No. 15.” Link
Related on Black-History.com
Cite this page
- MLA
- “Freedmen's Bureau.” Black-History.com, 30 Sept. 2026, https://black-history.com/glossary/freedmens-bureau/.
- APA
- Black-History.com Editors. (2026, September 30). Freedmen's Bureau. Black-History.com. https://black-history.com/glossary/freedmens-bureau/
- Chicago
- Black-History.com Editors. “Freedmen's Bureau.” Black-History.com. September 30, 2026. https://black-history.com/glossary/freedmens-bureau/.
By the Black-History.com editors. Last reviewed 30 September 2026. To suggest a primary source or a correction, write to editors@black-history.com or use our corrections form.