Too Great a Burden to Bear: The Struggle and Failure of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Texas by C.B. Bean

Pat Young

Brev. Brig. Gen'l
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Too Great a Burden to Bear: The Struggle and Failure of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Texas
by Christopher B. Bean published by Fordham University Press (2016) $25.00 Paperback $26.00 E-Textbook


Many areas of Reconstruction studies are little understood beyond a small number of academic specialists. One of the least understood by the general reader is the Freedmen’s Bureau. The Bureau was the first Federal program concerned with the welfare of a portion of the population, but it had few resources and was extremely short-lived. I wonder how many Americans have ever heard of it and, if they have, if they know that it only existed in most places between mid-1865 and the end of 1868.

The Freedmen’s Bureau was set up in response to the crises that enveloped many parts of the South as the Confederacy collapsed before an advancing Union Army and millions of African Americans were freed from bondage. As blacks were freed, there was an immediate crisis of lack of food and medical care for the freedpeople. Thousands died during this transitional phase. In addition to the immediate needs of life that the Bureau had to fill, there were longer-term issues as well.

Neither freedpeople nor former slaveowners had much previous experience with free labor. Both employer and worker needed to understand that free labor was not just slavery by another name. The Bureau also had to provide the first public education for blacks that most Southern communities had ever had. It was also a transmitter of new national policies on race. As African Americans were granted increased civil rights, the Bureau would play a role in educating whites and blacks about those rights and helping to enforce them.

Too Great a Burden to Bear traces the history of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Texas through the work of the Sub-Assistant Commissioners (SACs) who are commonly called Freedmen’s Bureau Agents today. There is background information on national policy coming from Commissioner O.O. Howard, and state policies from the Sub-Commissioners, but the strength of this book is its local focus. The way the SACs were recruited and selected, the limited training and guidance that they received, and the day to day work of the SACs make up the bulk of materials in Too Great a Burden to Bear.

Because of the length of this review, it will be posted in several installments.
 
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