As the war drew to a close the advocates of a policy of consolidation in negro affairs prevailed, and on March 3, 1865, an act was approved creating in the War Department a Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. This Bureau was to continue for one year after the close of the war and it was to control all matters relating to freedmen and refugees, that is, Unionists who had been driven out of the South. Food, shelter, and clothing were to be given to the needy, and abandoned or confiscated property was to be used for or leased to freedmen. At the head of the Bureau was to be a commissioner with an assistant commissioner for each of the Southern States. These officials and other employees must take the "ironclad" oath.
It was planned that the Bureau should have a brief existence, but the institution and its wards became such important factors in politics that on July 16, 1866, after a struggle with the President, Congress passed an act over his veto amplifying the powers of the Bureau and extending it for two years longer. This continuation of the Bureau was due to many things: to a belief that former slaveholders were not to be trusted in dealing with the negroes; to the baneful effect of the "Black Laws" upon Northern public opinion; to the struggle between the President and Congress over reconstruction; and to the foresight of radical politicians who saw in the institution an instrument for the political instruction of the blacks in the proper doctrines.
The new law was supplementary to the Act of 1865, but its additional provisions merely endorsed what the Bureau was already doing. It authorized the issue of medical supplies, confirmed certain sales of land to negroes, and provided that the promises which Sherman made in 1865 to the Sea Island negroes should be carried out as far as possible and that no lands occupied by blacks should be restored to the owners until the crops of 1866 were gathered; it directed the Bureau to coöperate with private charitable and benevolent associations, and it authorized the use or sale for school purposes of all confiscated property; and finally it ordered that the civil equality of the negro be upheld by the Bureau and its courts when state courts refused to accept the principle. By later laws the existence of the Bureau was extended to January 1, 1869, in the unreconstructed States, but its educational and financial activities were continued until June 20, 1872.