572 ★ CHAPTER 15 “What Is Freedom?”: Reconstruction
government social policy that seems to belong more comfortably to the New
Deal of the 1930s or the Great Society of the 1960s (see Chapters 21 and 25,
respectively) than to nineteenth- century America. Bureau agents were sup-
posed to establish schools, provide aid to the poor and aged, settle disputes
between whites and blacks and among the freedpeople, and secure for former
slaves and white Unionists equal treatment before the courts. “It is not... in
your power to fulfill one- tenth of the expectations of those who framed the
Bureau,” General William T. Sherman wrote to Howard. “I fear you have Her-
cules’ task.”
The Bureau lasted from 1865 to 1870. Even at its peak, there were fewer
than 1,000 agents in the entire South. Nonetheless, the Bureau’s achievements
in some areas, notably education and health care, were striking. While the
Bureau did not establish schools itself, it coordinated and helped to finance
the activities of northern societies committed to black education. By 1869,
nearly 3,000 schools, serving more than 150,000 pupils in the South, reported to
the Bureau. Bureau agents also assumed control of hospitals established by the
army during the war, and expanded the system into new communities. They
provided medical care and drugs to both black and white southerners. In eco-
nomic relations, however, the Bureau’s activities proved far more problematic.
Winslow Homer’s 1876 painting The Cotton Pickers, one of a series of studies of rural life in
Virginia, portrays two black women as dignified figures, without a trace of the stereotyping
so common in the era’s representations of former slaves. The expressions on their faces are
ambiguous, perhaps conveying disappointment that eleven years after the end of slavery
they are still at work in the fields.