 The Bureau provided food, housing, clothing, medical care, church services, some schooling, legal support, and arranged for labor contracts.Fierce debates about the rights of the Freedmen, and of the defeated Confederates, often accompanied by killings of black leaders, marked the Reconstruction Era, 1863–77.Slavery was never reestablished, but after 1877, white Democrats took control of all the southern states and blacks lost nearly all the political power they had achieved during Reconstruction.