Andrew Johnson: Veto of the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

In March 1865 the U.S. Congress established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly known as the Freedmen's Bureau. The purpose of the bureau, a federal agency administered by the Department of War, was to look to the material and social welfare of freed slaves and those made destitute by the Civil War by providing food, shelter, medical aid, and education; helping former slaves find paying work on former plantations or accept sharecropping and tenancy arrangements; reuniting families; and ensuring that freedmen received fair treatment in legal proceedings. The bureau had mixed results, principally because of inadequate funding and the lack of agents in the field. Further, the bureau attempted to relocate freed slaves on some 850,000 acres of abandoned southern land the North had seized during the Civil War. When Andrew Johnson pardoned many former Confederates, their land was restored to them, frustrating the bureau's efforts.

In 1866 Congress passed a bill to extend the life of the bureau—and to increase its powers. On February 19, 1866, Johnson sent the bill back to Congress with his veto. Congress overrode his veto, and the bureau survived until 1868, although some of its work, principally education and veterans' relief, continued until 1872. Often working in tandem with aid societies and missionaries, the bureau established some 4,300 schools and a hundred hospitals; Howard University, a historically black college, was named after Major General Oliver O. Howard, the bureau's commissioner.

It is fair to say that large numbers of white southerners detested the Freedmen's Bureau, and even in the North the bureau's mandate met with resistance. During the 1866 gubernatorial race in Pennsylvania, for example, racist posters attacking the bureau were circulated in support of a white supremacist candidate. The caption on the posters read “The Freedman's Bureau! An agency to keep the Negro in idleness at the expense of the white man.” The poster characterized the freedman's “estimate of freedom” as consisting of “Candy,” “Rum, Gin, Whiskey,” “Sugar Plums,” “Indolence,” “White Women,” “Apathy,” “White Sugar,” “Idleness,” “Fish Balls,” “Clams,” “Stews,” and “Pies.” In the South, bureau agents met with wide resistance. White southerners objected to the establishment of special courts that handled cases involving blacks, arguing that such courts were unconstitutional. In particular, they resented the military tribunals the bureau used to try whites accused of violating the rights of freedmen. White planters, restored to their land, generally harassed freedmen and exploited their labor. Numerous freedmen were lynched, but rarely was anyone prosecuted for the crimes. Indeed, during the months following the war, guerrilla actions continued. as some desperate southerners believed that the South could rise again and defeat the hated North. In many cases, however, objections to the Freedmen's Bureau were based on the more moderate belief that the states should look after the welfare of freedmen so that they did not become permanent wards of the federal government, a view held by General Howard himself.

It was in this context that Johnson vetoed the bill to extend the life of the Freedmen's Bureau. In his lengthy veto, he enumerates his objections to particular provisions of the bill as it was presented to him, but in this excerpt he emphasizes the constitutional issues. First, Johnson objects to the formation of military jurisdiction over the parts of the country served by the bureau. Although Johnson does not use the term, his objections to the imposition of a military government in the South prefigured the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, passed in the wake of Reconstruction to limit the ability of the federal government to use federal troops on American soil. The Latin phrase posse comitatus (the source of the word posse) means “power of the county” and refers to a county sheriff's authority under the act to assemble men to keep order, pursue criminals, and the like.

Johnson also objects to the bill because it “subjects any white person who may be charged with depriving a freedman of any civil rights or immunities belonging to white persons to imprisonment or fine, or both, without, however, defining the civil rights and immunities which are thus to be secured to the freedmen by military law.” The bill would expand the number of bureau agents, who then would be given unsupervised power to enforce the provisions of the bill in courts. Johnson sees this as a violation of the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution. The procedures under which such courts would operate would be arbitrary. The usual rules of evidence would not apply. Punishments meted out would be capricious. There would be no right of appeal to higher courts. The actions that could be considered punishable are overly extensive. In addition, trials by military tribunal would violate the fundamental constitutional right of a trial by an impartial jury in the state or district where the alleged crime took place. In response to the president's veto, Congress modified and passed a new bill, which Johnson once again promptly vetoed. The new bill was passed over his veto on July 16, 1866.