The Freedmen's Bureau, officially known as the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, was established on March 3, 1865. The agency, a part of the War Department, owed its very being to the Union's Civil War victory. Absent the war's consequences, particularly emancipation, the federal government would have had no reason to establish such an extraordinary organization that had the potential to insert itself into state, local, and individual affairs as it tried to guide white and black Southerners in their transition from a slave society to a free society. Because the agency was a departure from past experience, it was the product of compromise. Political restraint meant that the Freedmen's Bureau never had the resources or the power to accomplish what Congress demanded of it or what the freedpeople expected of it.

Labor, Land, and Education

Circumstances shaped the Bureau into an...