White Flight: Uncovering the History of White Refugees from the History of the Freedmen’s Bureau: 1861-1868

The role of Freedmen’s Bureau has been central to historian’s interpretations of the politics of Reconstruction over the course of the twentieth century. However that literature has primarily focussed on the Bureau’s assistance to the freedmen and placed little interpretive significance to the very substantial aid and services the Bureau provided to white refugees. The politics of the Freedmen’s bureau makes little sense without this chapter. Loyal and even disloyal Southerners received millions of dollars worth of direct assistance in the form of rations, seed, farm implements and transportation from the federal government and affiliated northern charities between 1861 and 1868. This paper seeks to examine the role of white refugees in the formation and extension of proto-welfare programs in the late Civil War and immediate post-war period under the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands (Freedmen’s Bureau)