Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867
458
grew food for themselves as well as staple crops, chiey cotton, that helped pay
for the Union war effort.
To govern the freedpeople and the land on which they lived, and to provide for
thousands of white Unionist refugees forced from their homes, Congress passed and
President Lincoln signed on 3 March 1865 an act that established the Bureau of Ref-
ugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, a title soon shortened in popular usage to
the Freedmen’s Bureau. Deliberations on the bill had extended through two sessions
of Congress. Introduced in December 1863 to establish a “Bureau of Emancipation,”
its provisions grew during the next fourteen months to include responsibility both for
destitute white Unionists in the South and for plantations that had fallen to the federal
government for nonpayment of taxes, or through abandonment by a disloyal owner, or
because the owner was a civil or military ofcer of one of the seceded states or of the
Confederacy itself. In the end, legislators felt so condent that revenues from manage-
ment of abandoned and forfeited lands would sufce to fund the new agency that they
failed to appropriate any money for its operations and its agents’ salaries. This lack of
budget meant that the Bureau had to be staffed by Army ofcers who were already on
the federal payroll. The new agency itself became part of the War Department.
2
At the Bureau’s head was a commissioner, Maj. Gen. Oliver O. Howard, who
had led the Army of the Tennessee on its march through Georgia and the Carolinas
during the last months of the war. “I hardly know whether to congratulate you or
not,” Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman wrote when he learned of his subordinate’s
appointment, “but . . . I cannot imagine that matters that may involve the future of
4,000,000 of souls could be put in more charitable and more conscientious hands.”
Assistant commissioners reporting to Howard in Washington would be in charge
of the Bureau’s affairs in the states. Local administration would be in the hands of
eld agents, each one responsible for several counties. Most of these agents were
ofcers of the Veteran Reserve Corps, an organization of wounded soldiers t for
light duty, or of the U.S. Colored Troops.
3
As paroled Confederate soldiers returned home in the spring of 1865, one hundred
thousand ofcers and men of the Army’s black regiments occupied dozens of camps
scattered from Key West, Florida, to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The largest body of
troops was the XXV Corps, twenty-nine regiments of cavalry, infantry, and heavy artil-
lery and one battery of light artillery, aboard ships bound for Texas, leaving no black
regiments in Virginia. The next-largest command numbered 21 regiments, with compa-
nies of 3 others, in Louisiana and 21 regiments and 3 batteries in Tennessee. Mississip-
pi played unwilling host to 12 regiments and several companies of another, as well as
2 batteries; North Carolina, to 10 regiments; Kentucky and South Carolina, to 9 each;
Arkansas, to 8 regiments and companies of 2 others, as well as 2 batteries; Florida,
to 6 regiments; and Alabama and Georgia, to 4 regiments each. A little farther north,
the 123d United States Colored Infantry (USCI), recently raised in Kentucky, guarded
2
George R. Bentley, A History of the Freedmen’s Bureau (New York: Octagon Books, 1974
[1944]), pp. 36–49; Steven Hahn et al., eds., Land and Labor, 1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2008), pp. 17–19. The text of the Freedmen’s Bureau Act appears in OR, ser. 3, vol.
5, pp. 19–20; the two Conscation Acts (August 1861 and July 1862), the Direct Tax Act (June 1862),
and subsequent acts implementing them are in U.S. Statutes at Large 12: 319, 422–26, 589–92; 13:
320–21, 375–78.
3
OR, ser. 1, vol. 47, pt. 3, p. 515 (quotation); Hahn et al., Land and Labor, pp. 19–20.