Description
In its brief seven-year existence, the Freedmen’s Bureau was the epicenter of the debate about Reconstruction. Historians have only recently begun to concentrate on the Bureau’s staff in Texas, the person agents termed the “hearts of Reconstruction.” Specifically addressing the historiographical debates in regards to the character of the Bureau and its sub-assistant commissioners (SACs), Too Great a Burden to Bear sheds new light at the work and reputation of these agents.
Focusing at the agents on a personal level, creator Christopher B. Bean reveals the kind of man Bureau officials believed qualified to oversee the Freedpeople’s transition to freedom. This work shows that every agent, moved by his sense of fairness and ideas of citizenship, gender, and labor, represented the agency’s policy in his subdistrict. These men further ensured the former slaves’ right to an education and right of mobility, something they never had at the same time as in bondage.