Administering Freedom

Reviewed by: Administering Freedom: The State of Emancipation after the Freedmen's Bureau by Dale Kretz Dennis Patrick Halpin (bio) Administering Freedom: The State of Emancipation after the Freedmen's Bureau. By Dale Kretz. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Pp. 412. Cloth, $110.00; paper, $39.95.) Dale Kretz's Administerintive and exclusionary system by showing howg Freedom is a significant addition to scholarship on the Reconstruction era, the expansion of the federal government, and the history of welfare in the United States. Kretz presents an engrossing analysis of how large numbers of Black men and women tenaciously [End Page 579] pushed to see their pension and bounty claims satisfied and, in the process, articulated an expanded vision of welfare in the United States. At the same time, it is also the story of the repercussions of the federal government's fitful efforts at compensating African American veterans and the formerly enslaved at the Civil War's conclusion. One of the chief strengths of Kretz's work is the way he expands our understanding of Reconstruction-era efforts at compensating Black men and women. As his subtitle indicates, Kretz places the Freedmen's Bureau at the start of a longer history that stretches into the New Deal era. In this exploration, Kretz mines important and underutilized archival collections. One of the chief attractions for historians of Reconstruction is Kretz's analysis of the Freedmen's Branch, the understudied federal agency charged with administrating freedpeople's still unprocessed claims following the Freedman's Bureau's closure. Kretz demonstrates how the demise of the Freedman's Bureau fundamentally changed the relationship between freed-people and the federal government. He maintains that with its closure, "tens of thousands of formerly enslaved men and women [were] rendered no longer as allies but as claimants" (4). Upon establishing this important change, Kretz follows Black claimants throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century as they continued to push their cases before the last of the agencies charged with disbursing claims, the U.S. Pension Bureau. The individual stories of African Americans as claimants for federal benefits drive Kretz's narrative. Kretz expertly reconstructs the poignant, and very often frustrating, stories of the ways that Black claimants interfaced with the government agencies charged with disbursing pensions and bounties. As he warns from the outset, his research required that his narrative would include "a large cast of characters but [not] a single protagonist" (12). Kretz weaves these varied stories together with great skill. He shows us how African Americans navigated the maddening (or, in his words, "Kafkaesque") and ostensibly race-neutral requirements that they confronted, ones asking them to prove their dates of birth, marital status, or medical history, when this documentation often did not exist. Black men and women were forced to call on friends, comrades, or former enslavers in efforts to prove their claims had merit. In some cases, we follow the plights of freedmen into medical examining rooms, wherein claimants battled over disability claims. In others, we journey with widowed freedwomen as they seek to prove their marriages to frequently skeptical administrators. Even after President Theodore Roosevelt ushered in the "first age-and-service pension in the nation's history" (282), Black applicants frequently found it difficult to prove their birth dates, since they could not produce the required documentation. [End Page 580] While the individual stories of freedpeople provide some of the richest details in Kretz's book, the way in which he stitches these stories together provides the import of his analysis. The aggregate experiences of African American men and women who interacted with the federal government had numerous repercussions. Kretz demonstrates how the tenacity of African American claimants who sought rights they viewed as intrinsic to their citizenship forced the federal government to continue to at least try to find some solutions to the problems created in the wake of the Civil War. This effort, as Kretz ably demonstrates, did not come easy. African Americans collectively mobilized to press their claims. In one of his best chapters, Kretz shows how Black populists worked to open the pension rolls to any formerly enslaved person who survived at the turn

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