Foregrounding the Freedmen’s Bureau: A Heterodox Welfare State History

ABSTRACT

The Freedmen’s Bureau was the first national U.S. welfare institution. This fact has not, however, motivated scholars to draw duly substantive connections between the Bureau and the welfare state. This article traces empirical patterns of labor, gender, and race from their first nationalization under the Bureau to their formative influence on the evolution of what is considered to be the welfare state. The article goes on to show the Bureau to mark the first instance of an actual U.S. welfare state. More importantly, the resulting reconceptualization suggests the Bureau to represent the only historical instance of an actual U.S. welfare state, all subsequent formations comprising merely a performative welfare state for lack of their attempt, or even intention, to fully rectify the enduring racial injustice inherited from chattel slavery. The performative welfare state, as it were, has thereby only ever prescribed systemically inequitable normativity antithetical to the notion of welfare.

KEYWORDS:

• Freedmen’s bureau
• welfare state
• race
• critical social work

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, known more commonly by the shorthand, the Freedmen’s Bureau, was the first U.S. national welfare institution, created in 1865 to serve the broad purposes of providing care and oversight to freedpersons (formerly enslaved persons), supporting Civil War refugees, and tending to the redistribution of lands seized or abandoned during war time. It is defined and discussed in greater detail below.

² This lattermost objective is omitted from the list of major initiatives not for lack of attention or desire among either Bureau personnel or beneficiaries, but because efforts to this end were so effectively stymied by President Andrew Johnson’s unilateral opposition as to render the net effect of the land redistribution program almost null (Anderson, 2016; Trefousse, 1999).

³ See also Mills (1997) and Pateman (1988) for explication of the ways in which social contract theory is and always has been inherently racialized and sexualized, respectively, and the harmful implications of these epistemological underpinnings for people of color, women, and queer-identified persons.

⁴ This despite even the influence of Frances Perkins, the first female cabinet member and longest-tenured U.S. Secretary of Labor, who served from 1933 to 1945 (Wandersee, 1993).