January & February 2002 Feature From Slavery to Freedom
Preserving the Records of the Freedmen's Bureau Freedmen work on
the James Hopkinson plantation on Edisto Island, SC.
(64-CN-8971) In the years following the Civil War, the Bureau of
Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (Freedmen's Bureau)
provided assistance to tens of thousands of former slaves making
the transition from slavery to freedom. The bureau issued food
and clothing, operated hospitals and refugee camps, established
schools, helped freedmen legalize marriages, supervised labor
contracts, and worked with African American soldiers and sailors
and their heirs to secure back pay, bounty payments, and
pensions. The records are a rich source of documentation for the
black experience in America for the second half of the 19th
century. Historians and scholars have long used Freedmen's
Bureau records to study the social and economic conditions of
blacks and the Federal Government's policies toward them
following the Civil War. In recent years, more