A Helping Hand

The spring season is hard in any agricultural society. Plants and animals are too small to eat.

- Heather Cox Richardson

But in the spring of 1865 in the South, things were not just hard, they were desperate.

Frightened families had abandoned their farms as Union troops invaded. No one had planted crops. Refugees, both white and Black, were just trying to survive. They crowded the roads trying to find any place that might offer food and shelter. They were at the mercy of thieves and former soldiers who traveled on the roads with them.

Northerners heard from soldiers and newspaper reporters of the bad situation in the South. In Congress, men considered the government’s responsibility to help former enslaved people survive the hard times. Others pointed out that white families were starving, too. Just like former enslaved people, white Southerners were searching for refuge in a region where the fields were ruined, factories destroyed, and homes burned.

African American children posed in front of their schoolhouse. A formal education had been denied to them as enslaved children.

It had never been the government’s job to feed people or find them places to live, but congressmen did not think it right to let their countrymen suffer. Yet they also did not want to make taking care of people the government’s permanent job. In March 1865, they found a compromise. They passed a law creating the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. They assigned it to the War Department to show that it was necessary only because of the Civil War. They set it up to last for just one year after hostilities ended.