The Bureau of Refugees Freedmen and Abandoned Lands opened its doors on the 3rd of March 1865. President Abraham Lincoln signed the bill creating this agency just days before his assassination.
Between 1865 and 1869 the bureau distributed fifteen million rations of food to freed African Americans. Five million additional rations went to impoverished white citizens across the South.
Union Army General Oliver O. Howard took command of operations in 1865. He later expressed great frustration about having his bureau closed down by others.
Congress dismantled the bureau in 1872 due to pressure from white Southerners. Southern white Democrats objected that bureau courts trying black cases without racial distinctions were unconstitutional.
The project completed on the 20th of June 2016 with help from twenty-five thousand volunteers. Virginia governor Tim Kaine announced indexing and digitization of bureau records in October 2006.