Today the U.S. Congress passes the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill, an act creating the Freedmen’s Bureau.
The bill is considered a major step in the early movement toward racial equality, providing assistance for former slaves in terms of food, housing, education and health care, in addition to oversight regarding employment contracts with private landowners.
Black Baptists, their faith being the predominant religion among former slaves now free, are greatly impacted by the bill. For many, having long been forced to attend white-led churches, the fiscal and labor assistance now being hammered out by the United States government provides significant support in separating from white-led churches to form autonomous congregations.
In the years following the war, the United States government revisits the Freedmen’s Bureau, tweaking its functions even as white resistance to the agency grows in the South, ultimately weakening its provisions. The bureau is abolished in 1872, opening the way in the years following to an escalation of white resistance to racial equality that lasts for another century.
The saga of Southern white resistance, including Baptists, to freedom for all and racial equality during the war years and the century following presents a complex portrait of Southern Baptists. In this week’s Virginia Baptist Religious Herald newspaper the Catholic Church is roundly criticized for insisting that “liberty of conscience” is a “damnable error,” yet many Southern Baptist leaders since the formation of their convention have attempted to silence voices criticizing slavery as evil, and for the next one hundreds years try to hush voices calling for the equality of the races.
Sources: “Freedmen’s Bureau” (link) and (link); “Rome Never Changes,” Religious Herald, March 2, 1865
