The Freedmen’s Bureau Was America’s First Broken Promise — The Pattern Repeats

Four million people woke up free. That is the fact that sits at the center of this story, and it is a fact so enormous in its implications that the mind struggles to absorb it: in the spring of 1865, as the Confederacy collapsed and the Union armies swept through the South, approximately four million human beings who had been legally classified as property were suddenly, by the force of arms and the stroke of a pen, reclassified as persons. They owned nothing. Most could not read. They had no land, no tools, no livestock, no savings, no legal identity, no surnames they had chosen for themselves. They had the clothes on their backs and the skills in their hands and the knowledge that the country that had enslaved them for two hundred and forty-six years was now, allegedly, prepared to make them citizens. And the country looked at four million newly free people who needed land, education, legal protection, and economic opportunity, and it created a single agency, funded it for seven years, and then shut it down. This was the Freedmen’s Bureau, and its story is the first chapter in a book that America has been writing ever since: the book of promises made to Black people and broken before the ink was dry.

The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands — its full and revealing name — was established by Congress on March 3, 1865, one month before Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. It was placed under the War Department and headed by Major General Oliver Otis Howard, a one-armed Union veteran who was genuinely committed to the welfare of the formerly enslaved and entirely unprepared for the political forces that would destroy his mission. The Bureau was tasked with nothing less than the transition of four million people from slavery to freedom: it was to provide food, clothing, and medical care; to establish schools; to negotiate labor contracts between formerly enslaved people and their former masters; to adjudicate disputes; and, most critically, to oversee the redistribution of confiscated and abandoned Confederate land to the freedpeople.

Forty Acres and a Broken Word

The phrase “forty acres and a mule” has become, in the American lexicon, a kind of bitter shorthand for the nation’s racial debt, invoked in conversations about reparations and then dismissed with the same practiced ease with which the original promise was dismissed a century and a half ago. But the phrase refers to a specific document, a specific order, issued by a specific general for specific reasons, and its reversal is one of the most consequential acts of betrayal in American history.

On January 16, 1865, General William Tecumseh Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, which set aside a strip of coastland from Charleston, South Carolina, to the St. Johns River in Florida — roughly 400,000 acres of some of the most fertile land in the South — for the exclusive settlement of the freed slaves. Each family was to receive a plot of not more than forty acres. The order was later supplemented by the provision of Army mules. By June 1865, approximately 40,000 freedpeople had been settled on 400,000 acres of land under Sherman’s order. They were planting crops. They were building homes. They were, for the first time in their lives and the lives of their ancestors, working land that was their own.

Then Andrew Johnson became president. Lincoln’s assassination elevated to the presidency a man who was, by temperament and conviction, a white supremacist — a point that is not editorial but biographical, supported by Johnson’s own words, his own vetoes, his own explicit statements that “this is a country for white men.” In the autumn of 1865, Johnson ordered the restoration of all confiscated and abandoned lands to their former Confederate owners. The freedpeople who had been settled on those lands — who had plowed them, planted them, built homes on them — were evicted. The land was returned to the men who had committed treason against the United States in defense of slavery, and the men and women who had been enslaved on that land were told to negotiate labor contracts with their former masters or leave.

“The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”
— W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1935

This was not a failure of implementation. It was a deliberate act of policy reversal by a president who believed that Black people were inherently inferior and that the Union had fought the war to preserve itself, not to elevate the Negro. Johnson vetoed the Freedmen’s Bureau renewal bill in 1866. Congress overrode his veto, but the Bureau that survived was a diminished thing, stripped of its land-distribution mandate and operating with a fraction of the resources its mission required. By 1872, it was gone entirely.

What the Bureau Actually Accomplished

The tragedy of the Freedmen’s Bureau is that even in its diminished, underfunded, politically sabotaged form, it accomplished extraordinary things — things that demonstrate what might have been possible had the nation kept its promise. In seven years of operation, the Bureau established more than 1,000 schools for freedpeople across the South, enrolling approximately 250,000 students. It laid the institutional foundations for what would become some of the most important universities in Black American history: Howard University (named for the Bureau’s commissioner), Fisk University, Hampton Institute, Atlanta University, and Morehouse College. It established the first public school systems in several Southern states — systems that, notably, served both Black and white students, since the antebellum South had no tradition of public education for anyone.

The Bureau also provided medical care, establishing over forty hospitals and treating more than a million patients in a region where formerly enslaved people had no access to medical services. It negotiated labor contracts that, while deeply imperfect and often exploitative, at least established the principle that Black labor should be compensated. It adjudicated thousands of disputes between freedpeople and their former masters, providing a rudimentary but real system of legal protection for people who had previously had no legal standing whatsoever.

All of this was accomplished with approximately 900 agents covering the entire South — a territory of roughly 500,000 square miles containing four million formerly enslaved people. The Bureau was understaffed by at least an order of magnitude. Its agents were frequently threatened, assaulted, and murdered by white Southerners who viewed any assistance to Black people as an intolerable interference with the natural order. Its funding was perpetually inadequate. It was, in every measurable way, set up to fail. And yet it built the institutional infrastructure — the schools, the universities, the hospitals, the legal frameworks — that would sustain Black progress for the next century.

The Pattern: Promise, Abandon, Repeat

If the Freedmen’s Bureau were an isolated incident — a single broken promise in an otherwise reliable relationship between Black Americans and their federal government — it would be a historical tragedy but not a structural lesson. But it is not an isolated incident. It is the first iteration of a pattern so consistent, so thoroughly documented, so relentlessly repeated across a century and a half that to describe it as anything other than a pattern requires a willful blindness that borders on the pathological.

Consider the sequence. The Freedmen’s Bureau promised land, education, and legal protection. It was defunded in seven years, and the land was returned to the Confederates. Reconstruction promised political participation, civil rights, and equal protection under the law. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were ratified, Black men were elected to Congress, state legislatures, and local offices — and then the federal troops were withdrawn in the Compromise of 1877, and the entire edifice of Black political participation was dismantled over the following two decades through violence, fraud, and the systematic disenfranchisement of Jim Crow.

The New Deal promised economic recovery for all Americans. But the programs that constituted the New Deal — the Social Security Act, the Wagner Act, the Federal Housing Administration — were deliberately designed to exclude Black workers. Social Security originally excluded agricultural workers and domestic servants, categories that encompassed approximately 65% of the Black workforce. The FHA’s underwriting manual explicitly mandated the use of restrictive covenants and redlining, directing federal housing subsidies away from Black neighborhoods and toward white suburbs. The GI Bill, which created the white middle class, was administered through state and local agencies that systematically denied its benefits to Black veterans.

The War on Poverty promised to uplift America’s poorest communities. Lyndon Johnson declared “unconditional war on poverty” in 1964, and the programs that followed — Head Start, Job Corps, Community Action Programs — provided real benefits to real families. But funding was diverted to the Vietnam War. Richard Nixon dismantled the Office of Economic Opportunity. The War on Poverty was replaced by the War on Drugs, which targeted the same communities the poverty programs had been designed to help, incarcerating hundreds of thousands of Black men for offenses that white men committed at similar rates but were rarely prosecuted for.

Affirmative action was implemented, challenged, narrowed, and effectively gutted over five decades of Supreme Court litigation. Fair housing laws were passed in 1968 and have been enforced with a laxity that amounts to non-enforcement; the residential segregation of American cities today is only marginally less severe than it was when the Fair Housing Act was signed. Executive orders on diversity, equity, and inclusion have been issued by one administration and rescinded by the next, creating a policy environment in which the most significant federal commitments to racial equity have the shelf life of a single presidential term.

“I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
— James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, 1955

The Arithmetic of Dependence

The purpose of cataloging these broken promises is not to compile a grievance. Grievance is easy, and it is also useless. The purpose is to establish, with the force of documented, irrefutable historical evidence, a conclusion that should be the starting point for every conversation about Black economic strategy in America: the federal government is not a reliable partner.

This is not a partisan observation. The pattern of promise and abandonment crosses party lines with a consistency that would be impressive if it were not devastating. Republican administrations have rolled back civil rights protections. Democratic administrations have implemented programs with structural exclusions that gutted their effectiveness for Black Americans. The federal government, regardless of which party controls it, has demonstrated over 160 years that its commitment to Black equality extends precisely as far as the current political calculus permits, and not one inch further.

The lesson is not that the government should be absolved of its obligations. It should not. The debts are real, they are documented, and they are owed. The lesson is that waiting for the government to pay those debts is a strategy that has failed for a century and a half, and continuing to pursue it while expecting different results is not persistence — it is an unwillingness to learn from history.

Every generation of Black Americans since Reconstruction has been offered a version of the same proposition: trust the federal government to deliver justice, and in the meantime, organize your political and economic life around the expectation of that delivery. Every generation has discovered, at the end of the electoral cycle or the legislative session or the presidential term, that the delivery has been delayed, diluted, or canceled entirely. And every generation has then been told, by the same political class that failed to deliver, that the solution is more trust, more patience, more votes for the party that promises to try harder next time.

What the Freedpeople Built Without the Bureau

Here is the part of the story that is almost never told, because it complicates the narrative of Black dependency that both political parties find useful for different reasons: when the Bureau was dismantled, the freedpeople did not stop building. They built anyway. They built schools when the Bureau schools were closed. They built churches that served as schools, as courthouses, as community centers, as mutual aid societies. They built benevolent associations — organizations like the Independent Order of St. Luke, the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows, the Knights of Pythias — that provided insurance, burial benefits, and small loans to their members decades before the government offered any social safety net to anyone.

They built Tuskegee Institute. Booker T. Washington, born enslaved, opened Tuskegee Normal School in 1881 in a shanty and a church, with thirty students and no funding, and built it into the most important institution of Black vocational education in the country. They built the National Negro Business League. They built the Black church into the most powerful institutional network in Black America — a network that owned property, educated children, organized communities, and provided the organizational infrastructure for every major civil rights campaign of the twentieth century. They did this with no government funding, no philanthropic backing (at first), no institutional support of any kind except the determination of people who understood that if they did not build for themselves, no one would build for them.

The Black land-grant colleges that were established under the Second Morrill Act of 1890 — the “1890 institutions” — were funded at a fraction of the level of their white counterparts for their entire history, and they still produced the majority of Black professionals in America for the better part of a century. Meharry Medical College and Howard University’s College of Medicine trained more than 80% of Black doctors in America for decades. These institutions survived not because of government generosity but in spite of government neglect, sustained by the tuition of students who could barely afford it, the labor of faculty who could have earned more elsewhere, and the donations of alumni who understood that these schools were the only pathway to professional life that was open to Black Americans.

The More Reliable Path

The question facing Black America today is not whether the government owes us. It does. The question is not whether reparations are justified. They are — the historical evidence for a material debt owed by the United States government to the descendants of enslaved people is as solid as any legal claim in American history. The question is whether we will organize our economic lives, the Black community institutions, our educational strategies, and our family structures around the expectation that this debt will be paid — or whether we will do what the freedpeople did after the Bureau was destroyed, what Madam Walker did without a single government program, what the builders of Sweet Auburn and Parrish Street and Bronzeville did under Jim Crow: build anyway.

Self-reliance is not a rejection of justice. It is a strategy that does not depend on the cooperation of people who have demonstrated, over 160 years, that their cooperation cannot be relied upon. It is the recognition that every dollar you earn and keep and invest in your own community is a dollar that no administration can claw back, no Congress can defund, no Supreme Court can overrule, and no executive order can rescind. It is the understanding that the most durable forms of Black progress in American history — the Black church, the Black college, the Black business district, the Black professional class — were built not by government programs but by Black hands, Black dollars, and Black determination.

The Freedmen’s Bureau was America’s first broken promise. It was not the last. The pattern has repeated with such regularity, across such a span of time, under such a variety of political conditions, that to expect it to change is not optimism but delusion. The freedpeople who lived through the Bureau’s dismantling did not have the luxury of delusion. They looked at the wreckage of a federal promise and they built schools, churches, businesses, and communities with their own resources, on their own terms, answerable to no one except themselves and their God. They were not naive. They were practical. They understood that the only freedom worth having is the freedom you build yourself, because it is the only freedom that cannot be taken back. That understanding is their legacy. Whether we claim it or continue to wait for the next promise that will not be kept — that is ours to decide.