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When the war ended, the military’s education work became the primary function of the Freedmen’s Bureau.

Over the course of eight years, the Freedmen’s Bureau helped establish and maintain 4,000 schools, hire over 9,000 teachers, and educate over 200,000 Black students.

By 1867, Congress was legislating on the subject, creating a federal Department of Education to work alongside the Freedmen’s Bureau and continue its work after the bureau inevitably wound down.

The Reconstruction Framers not only fundamentally altered the Constitution; they also created the nation’s first federal social welfare agency—the Freedmen’s Bureau—to provide access to food, medical care, and education to Black Americans freed from enslavement and refugees whose lives had been uprooted by wartime devastation.

The Freedmen’s Bureau legislation provides crucial insight into what protection meant to those who wrote the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection.