LITMIR.BIZ

      Figure 2.1. “The New York and Brooklyn Freedmen’s Bureau, Application Blank.” Courtesy of the Collection of Brooklyn, NY, Civil War Relief Associations Records, Ephemera, and Other Material, ARC.245, box 5, folder 7, Brooklyn Historical Society.

      After Congress passed a bill creating the Freedmen’s Bureau in March 1865, the agency took over relief efforts in the city and surrounding areas. Charles Henry (C. H.) Howard, Oliver’s brother and the bureau’s assistant commissioner in Washington, ordered that black refugees refusing situations offered to them—whether in the District or elsewhere—would be removed from relief rolls and prohibited from government-run camps.63 This policy prevailed even though a considerable number of local white employers, conditioned to slavery, which was abolished in Washington in 1862 with the Compensated Emancipation Act, refused to pay the black laborers they hired. Officials at Camp Barker reported that civilians regularly used its employment agency to hire black women as domestics, then denied them wages on the grounds that they had been paid in room and board.64 Although the bureau did establish primary education for blacks in the District, and opened seven industrial sewing schools, programs designed to enhance the long-term prospects of the city’s black population often took a backseat to more immediate concerns of shrinking relief expenditures.65

      The policies directed at refugees bore resemblance to the treatment of Irish women in the 1850s. Both black and Irish women were faulted for displaying agency that went against what third parties had determined constituted their greatest good, when they chose to remain in Washington or New York, respectively. In June 1865, Assistant Commissioner John Eaton ordered bureau agents in Washington to scout for work opportunities that might allow for refugees’ removal from “abodes of filth,” “idleness,” and the “social peril” that makeshift and overcrowded dwellings cultivated.66 Although such efforts were already under way before Eaton’s order, the growing size of the refugee community in Washington, and difficulties finding employment, made the matter more pressing. On occasion, the reality of labor market conditions in Washington did cause bureau officials to reconsider their opinions about the factors contributing to black unemployment. In May 1867, for instance, Howard wrote to the Industrial School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which trained and placed black refugees from Washington in service positions in the Boston area, to negotiate an agreement where the bureau would pay the salary of the school’s matron and rent on its building in exchange for the institution accepting, unequivocally, any of the migrants the bureau sent. Although Howard admitted that he had previously pledged that “no paupers should be sent” to the school, he hedged by explaining that Washington was “so overcrowded it is impossible for all to be employed.”67 In the context of Washington’s large refugee population and the surplus labor it created, one could be—Howard suggested—a deserving black pauper. An individual surrendered this status, however, if she refused to relocate for work.