Newly emancipated people braved the unpredictability of the Civil War, not knowing whether Union officials would recognize their conditional claims to freedom that President Abraham Lincoln legalized in the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863. As the war came to a close in the spring of 1865, congressional Republicans began an ambitious mission to usher the South, and the freed people who resided there, through the complicated transition from slavery to freedom. For African Americans, the realities of the war’s end meant that they could fully step into freedom. They could live and work as freed people. And most importantly, they could reunite with their families.

The practicalities of emancipation for African Americans, however, remained a hurdle. In the spring of 1864, in response to Black mutual aid and freedmen’s aid societies, Republican Thomas Eliot, a Massachusetts congressman, introduced a bill to create an “Emancipation Bureau.” This would be a federal agency empowered to help the almost four million freed people in the South. After a nearly year-long debate in Congress between the House and Senate, President Lincoln signed legislation to create the Freedmen’s Bureau on the last day of his first term as president. Established on March 3, 1865, and officially labeled the “Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands,” the Freedmen’s Bureau was under the jurisdiction of the Department of War. The Bureau was authorized to act as an extension of the federal government. Its agents worked to enact federal efforts to rebuild the South in the aftermath of the Civil War. The Freedmen’s Bureau represented the first and the most sustained interactions that African Americans would have with the federal government.

The bureau symbolized the federal government’s authority in the former Confederate South. Its work was highly varied. Bureau agents were charged with the “control of all subjects relating to refugees and freedmen in rebel states.” At its height, from March 1865 to December 1868, the bureau employed commissioners and agents who oversaw courts and legal proceedings involving freed people. They established schools and hired teachers who taught freed people how to read. The bureau established hospitals and provided food and clothing to recently emancipated African Americans. Moreover, bureau agents negotiated labor contracts between freed people and former enslavers. They also oversaw the distribution of ex-Confederate land and helped Black soldiers collect war pensions.

One of the biggest responsibilities of the bureau’s administrators and agents was to legalize freed peoples’ marriages and reunite Black families torn apart through the violence of slavery. On May 5, 1865, the Freedman’s Bureau commissioner, General Oliver Otis Howard, issued Circular No. 5, which authorized assistant commissioners “in places where the local statutes make no provisions for the marriage of persons of color . . . to designate officers who shall keep a record of marriages, which may be solemnized by any ordained minister of the gospel.” This meant that Freedmen’s Bureau agents stationed throughout the South were made responsible for keeping a record of African Americans’ marriages. Further, they were charged to find ordained ministers to formalize the marriages.

Some assistant commissioners went a step further by publishing marital guidance and rules to freed people. On August 11, 1865, General Rufus Saxton, the assistant commissioner in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, issued General Order No. 8, entitled “Marriage Rules.” Saxton sought to “correct as far as possible one of the cruelest wrongs inflicted by slavery, and also to aid the freedmen in properly appreciating and religiously observing the sacred obligation of the marriage state.” He outlined who was eligible to get married, the people authorized to grant marriage permits, and the rights of wives and children. By formalizing their marriages, freed people made claims to one another and to their children. They sought validation of their relationships from federal authorities to protect themselves from the onslaught of white racial violence that characterized Reconstruction in the South.

Congress shut down the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1872 due to increased political pressure from the rising tide of congressional Democrats. But by this point, the Bureau had issued tens of thousands of marriage certificates to African American couples who legalized their bonds of marriage and family after the Civil War, helping to solidify Black families during Reconstruction and beyond.