Book Review

Canada and the United States

As editors Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller note in the preface to this collection of essays, George R. Bentley's 1955 history of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands (commonly known as the Freedmen's Bureau) remains the only complete history of that federal agency. Over the years, Bentley's work has been augmented by a number of state studies. Treatments of the Bureau in South Carolina and Louisiana appeared in 1967 and 1970. More recently, three contributors to this volume have published studies of Texas (Barry A. Crouch, 1992), Arkansas (Randy Finley, 1996), and Georgia (Cimbala, 1997). Moreover, during the past two decades, Ira Berlin (together with coeditors Leslie Rowland and Joseph P. Reidy, among others) began publishing Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867. Drawing from a vast archival record relating to the Bureau, that series has also helped to lay the foundation for new inquiries into the complex aftermath of the Civil War. One of the authors in this collection, John C. Rodrique, worked as a coeditor for one of the volumes of Freedom, and two others—Michael L. Lanza and James D. Schmidt—acknowledge their debt to the documentary project. As these essays reveal, the records of the Freedmen's Bureau provide an extraordinarily rich resource for historians.	1
The Bureau existed briefly (1865–1872) to smooth the path to freedom in the postemancipation South. The volume's first essay, by Brooks D. Simpson, suggests the dilemma that the Bureau faced. Simpson examines Ulysses S. Grant's attitudes toward the Bureau at the close of the war. Grant followed an uncertain course as Congress passed the second Freedmen's Bureau bill in February 1866 and as President Andrew Johnson worked to restore civil authority in the former Confederacy. Riots in Memphis and New Orleans made it clear to Grant that local authorities "failed to notice crime" (p. 20), but the army commander refrained from ordering military intervention. In Grant's uncertainty lay the Bureau's dilemma: the conflicting interests of former masters and former slaves often proved impossible to resolve.	2
Johnson's hostility toward the Bureau bill defined his fight with congressional Republicans. Hans L. Trefousse considers why it was that Johnson failed to follow Abraham Lincoln's example and attempt to forge a coalition with moderate Republicans, like Illinois senator Lyman Trumbull, who shared many of Johnson's misgivings about radicalism. But Trumbull sponsored the Bureau bill, and an alliance with him required that Johnson express at least a limited support for the principle of racial equality under law. Trefousse finds that Johnson's racism made such a coalition impossible. When Johnson vetoed the Bureau bill, Trumbull stood with the Republican majority in determined opposition to the president.	3
Once Johnson began restoring property to pardoned Confederates, the best hope for significant land reform in the South lay with the implementation of the Southern Homestead Act, signed into law by Johnson in June 1866. Oliver O. Howard, the national commissioner of the Bureau, clearly hoped to make good use of this federal legislation, as did a number of state commissioners. Nevertheless, Lanza finds Bureau agents torn between a desire to help the freedmen acquire land and a commitment to maintain existing labor contracts through the 1866 agricultural season. The freedmen displayed no ambiguity on the matter. The commissioner for Georgia noted among the freedmen an "almost universal desire to possess land." Lanza estimates that between twenty and twenty-five percent of all applicants for land were freedmen and that "their success rate was equal to or greater than that of whites." Nevertheless, the Southern Homestead Act could not make landowners of most freedmen. "In the end," concludes Lanza, "the promise of land for the freedmen was illusory" (p. 87).	. . .