Administering Freedom

Kretz traces how people who had been enslaved in the United States sought money and entitlements from the federal government, a process that stretched from the Civil War to the New Deal. Over those decades they moved from a population with no clear standing in the nation's records to individuals whose citizenship was documented on paper.

The Black southerners who filed these claims dealt with many federal offices. The book revisits their dealings with the Freedmen's Bureau and the Pension Bureau, which are better known, and examines the Freedmen's Branch, an agency that has largely slipped from memory, for the first time.

Drawing on archival research in collections that have seldom been consulted, Kretz documents how tens of thousands of Black claimants organized politically to press for military bounties, back pay, and pensions. Some of these efforts succeeded within the federal bureaucracy, and the book recounts several surprising outcomes.

Having gained freedom and rights as citizens, these claimants had to work through questions of slavery, identity, family, loyalty, dependency, and disability while the federal administrative state grew rapidly in size and reach. For many Black families that state offered essential support, and it also became a route into a new liberal political order.