Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Freedmen's Bureau was established on the 3rd of March 1865, and operated until November 1872. Congress abruptly terminated it in June 1872, and all its records were transferred to the War Department.
Union Army General Oliver O. Howard served as the first Freedmen's Bureau Commissioner starting in 1865. He organized the Bureau into four divisions, oversaw the distribution of confiscated Confederate property for schools, and arranged transportation and housing for teachers heading south.
Between 1865 and 1869, the Bureau distributed 15 million rations of food to freed African Americans and 5 million rations to impoverished whites. It also set up a system allowing planters to borrow rations to feed the freedmen they employed, though only 10% of the funds set aside for that purpose was actually borrowed.
By the end of 1865, more than 90,000 former slaves were enrolled in Freedmen's Bureau schools, with attendance rates of about 80%. The Bureau spent $5 million on schools for Black students and helped establish approximately 25 institutions of higher learning between 1866 and 1872, including Howard University in Washington, D.C., in 1867.
The Bureau was steadily weakened by President Andrew Johnson's opposition, rising Ku Klux Klan violence across the South, and Southern Democrats in Congress stripping its funding by 1869. Congress terminated the Bureau in 1872 under pressure from white Southerners, doing so while Commissioner Howard was away in the west handling Apache-settler conflicts.
The Bureau's work helped establish the historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) that became the primary institutions of higher learning for Black Americans through decades of segregation. Today approximately 105 HBCUs graduate over 50% of Black-American professionals, 50% of Black-American public school teachers, and 70% of Black-American dentists.
In 2000, Congress passed the Freedmen's Bureau Preservation Act, directing the National Archivist to preserve Bureau records on microfilm. The Freedmen's Bureau Project, completed on the 20th of June 2016, used more than 25,000 volunteers to transcribe the records; by June 2025, more than 98,000 volunteers had transcribed 1,491,092 pages, making them searchable through the Freedmen's Bureau Search Portal.