In January 1865 General William T. Sherman authorized the confiscation of Confederate land along the Atlantic Coast for redistribution into 40-acre tracts to be given to newly freed African Americans such as freedman Richard Brown. Later that year President Andrew Johnson ended this land redistribution and returned captured properties to pardoned former landowners.
Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, National Archives and Records Administration
Land order for Richard Brown, April 1, 1865 (Charleston, South Carolina)
The Freedmen's Bureau
In 1865 Congress created the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, to address the needs of displaced and formerly enslaved persons. The bureau administered humanitarian, economic, and legal services; supervised labor contracts; and redistributed abandoned lands. Congress re-chartered the Freedmen’s Bureau over President Andrew Johnson’s veto in 1866, but terminated its activities in 1872. African Americans elected to the House who had worked for the Freedmen’s Bureau included John Mercer Langston, Jeremiah Haralson, Josiah Walls, and Robert C. De Large.
The greatest success of the Freedmen’s Bureau lay in the planting of the free school among the Negroes, and the idea of free elementary education among all classes in the South.
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Freedmen’s Bureau, 1901
In January 1865 General William T. Sherman authorized the confiscation of Confederate land along the Atlantic Coast for redistribution into 40-acre tracts to be given to newly freed African Americans such as freedman Richard Brown. Later that year President Andrew Johnson ended this land redistribution and returned captured properties to pardoned former landowners.
Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, National Archives and Records Administration
