In the wake of the Civil War, the federal government sought to support freed people by establishing social welfare programs such as the Freedmen’s Bureau. Southern whites rejected these efforts in rhetoric, linking race and welfare that defines political discourse to this day. “The same sun is still there, the same mighty country is there: yes, and the same negro is there to work that once was,” editors of Louisville’s The Courier Journal lamented on June 14 1868. “But he doesn’t work, and why? Because while all the national wealth that once was there is there still, the Freedmen’s Bureau has gone there too . . . [and] tells the negro ‘Work no more, for in the sweat of the white man’s face at the north you may earn your bread.” These words echoed across the South and over subsequent decades.
This response reflected deeply rooted racial stereotypes that defined both political, social, and economic landscapes, North and South, in the nineteenth-century, as historian Stephen Kantrowitz notes. Post-Civil War conversations surrounding social welfare were ultimately undercut by policy that transcended sectionalism and wove racial stereotypes into the very fabric of progressive ideologies. While the federal Pension Bureau emerged as the primary mechanism of federal welfare, as historian Holly A. Pinheiro, Jr. details, conversations surrounding charity on the home front were racially divided. Though few questioned the extension of welfare to white veterans, widows, and orphans, there was mixed support surrounding charity for freed people.
The broader goal of the Freedmen’s Relief Association and other charities aimed at supporting freed people was simple and radical: an eloquent vision that “we [the nation],” noted Virginia Governor F.H. Pierpont, “shall be held accountable as a nation. The care of these four millions of human beings, thus thrown, uneducated and unprepared, upon their own resources, will require an immense amount of intelligent, considerate, and disinterested labor.” But critics bemoaned the focus on freedmen: “We must not,” wrote Henry Bellows, chairman of the Sanitary Commission, “permit the freedmen, or the needy Southerners, to absorb our attention to the neglect of this most deserving class of our own people—the widows and orphans of the war.” Bellows, who had called for Black enlistments as a means of filling New York’s quotas in 1863 and who fought for the welfare of soldiers and civilians, was unwilling to extend that sentiment to southern Blacks. The duality of these sentiments underscores the tepid empathy of a fragmented north that paved the way for the racialization of welfare politics.