Of The Dawn Of Freedom

However, as Du Bois clearly points out, it is easy;

“To heap on the Freedmen’s Bureau all the evils of that evil day, and damn it utterly for every mistake and blunder that was made. All this is easy, but it is neither sensible nor just. This Bureau set going a system of free labor, established a beginning of peasant proprietorship, secured the recognition of black freedmen before the courts of law, and founded the free common school in the south. On the other hand, it failed to begin the establishment of good-will between ex-masters and freedmen.” W.E.B. Du Bois

The Nation failed to recognize the true possibilities that a fully functional Freedmen’s Bureau could have played in forming a healthier nation after the war. Had it been given the full political, legal, and financial foundation it needed…and honest, fair and reasonable staff…it might not have taken another 100 years for the African American citizens of this nation to reach a point where we can try to pretend we are equal citizens.

Du Bois explains:

“Had political exigencies been less pressing, the opposition to government guardianship of Negroes less bitter, and the attachment to the slave system less strong, the social seer can well imagine a far better policy, a permanent Freedmen’s Bureau, with a national system of Negro schools; a carefully supervised employment and labor office; a system of impartial protection before the regular courts; and such institutions for social betterment as savings-banks, land and building associations, and social settlements.

All this vast expenditure of money and brains might have formed a great school of prospective citizenship, and solved in a way we have not yet solved the most perplexing and persistent of the Negro problems. That such an institution was unthinkable in 1870 was due in part to certain acts of the Freedmen’s Bureau itself. It came to regard its work as merely temporary, and Negro suffrage as a final answer to all present perplexities.

The political ambition of many of its agents and protégés led it far a field into questionable activities, until the South, nursing its own deep prejudices, came easily to ignore all the good deeds of the Bureau and hate its very name with perfect hatred. So the Freedmen’s Bureau died, and its child was the Fifteenth Amendment.

The passing of a great human institution before its work is done, like the untimely passing of a