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

The Freedmen's Bureau, established by Congress in 1865, was 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. Established in Georgia during late 1865 and 1866, the Bureau was positioned to play a crucial role in the implementation of Reconstruction policy, translating directives, laws, and constitutional guarantees into the new reality promised by emancipation. In the end, however, the agency failed to leave a lasting impression on the state. Georgia's citizens were left to themselves to work out their new social, political, and economic arrangements. The ineffectiveness of the Bureau in Georgia and other southern states has often been blamed on the racism of its northern administrators, but the explanation of its failure is not so simple. Paul A. Cimbala shows a more complex picture of Reconstruction and the Bureau by examining the intellectual underpinnings of the men who ran the agency and how they organized their command, by exploring the personal stories of men who faced the problems of Reconstruction at the local level, by presenting a detailed account of the events that transpired along the Georgia coast in the Sherman Reservation, and by assessing the agency's work in education, relief, civil rights, and labor.