Under the Guardianship of the Nation: The Freedmen's Bureau and the Reconstruction of Georgia, 1865-1870

Paul A. Cimbala

Under the Guardianship of the Nation: The Freedmen's Bureau and the Reconstruction of Georgia, 1865-1870
Format
Paperback
Publisher
University of Georgia Press
Country
United States
Published
10 March 2003
Pages
432
ISBN
9780820325118

Under the Guardianship of the Nation: The Freedmen’s Bureau and the Reconstruction of Georgia, 1865-1870

Paul A. Cimbala

The Freedmen’s Bureau was an extraordinary agency established by Congress in 1865, born of the expansion of federal power during the Civil War and the Union’s desire to protect and provide for the South’s emancipated slaves. Charged with the mandate to change the southern racial status quo in education, civil rights, and labor, the Bureau was in a position to play a crucial role in the implementation of Reconstruction policy.

The ineffectiveness of the Bureau in Georgia and other southern states has often been blamed on the racism of its northern administrators, but Paul A. Cimbala finds the explanation to be much more complex. In this remarkably balanced account, he blames the failure on a combination of the Bureau’s northern free-labor ideology, limited resources, and temporary nature–as well as deeply rooted white southern hostility toward change. Because of these factors, the Bureau in practice left freedpeople and ex-masters to create their own new social, political, and economic arrangements.

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