“A Vast Labor Bureau”: The Freedmen’s Bureau and the Administration of Countervailing Black Labor Power
For a few short years starting in 1865, the Freedmen’s Bureau exercised regulatory power over labor markets in a fashion unprecedented in ambition, scope, and reach in U.S. history up to that point—and, arguably, since. The Bureau used its broad authority to construct, regulate, and coordinate labor in the post-slavery South according to a racial-egalitarian vision […]