See also: Grange Movement.

An idealistic effort at mass social reform, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, com-monly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, eased the transition from bondage to citizenship for 4 million blacks and assisted in the reunion of slave families. After the Emancipation Proclamation began liberat-ing blacks on January 1, 1863, abolitionist Martin Robinson Delany, the grandson of African captives and the nation’s first black field commander, advised President Abraham Lincoln on the needs of ex-slaves and promoted humanitarianism. In autumn 1864, Delany’s foresight proved a lifesaver to the ragged, malnourished camp fol-lowers who trailed behind General William Tecumseh Sherman on his march from Atlanta to the sea at Savan-nah, Georgia. A field order awarded the islands south of Charleston, South Carolina, to the newly liberated, who settled on abandoned rice plantations on the islands and along the St. Johns River in Florida. A month before the war’s end, Congress established a federal agency on March 3, 1865, as part of the Freed-men’s Bureau Bill and empowered its officers to appropriate Confederate estates in Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Tennessee for use by 30,000 black farmers. All aspects of the resettlement came under the purview of the War Department. For seven years, the Freedmen’s Bureau chief, General Oliver O. Howard, a former officer of Sherman’s staff, and Howard’s assistant commissioner, General Clinton B. Fisk, made available homes and food banks, 100 hospitals and orphanages, and jobs for former slaves in the urban and rural South. Extensive paperwork recorded …