Freedmen's Bureau

Congress created the Freedmen's Bureau to hep unskilled, unlettered, and moneyless freedmen survive. On paper it was a primitive welfare agency. It would provide food, clothing, medical care, and education to freedmen. Its greatest success was that it taught 200,000 blacks how to read. The bureau authorized for former slaves to settle on 40 acre tracts confiscated by confederates but little land actually made it into black's hands. The South viewed the Freedmen's Bureau as a meddlesome federal agency. Johnson tried to kill it several times.