Read more
Instructed by Congress to divide lands abandoned to the Union army into forty-acre plots and award them to freedmen, Howard began a program that might have given many families farms of their own. The effort had barely begun when it ran into President Andrew Johnson's policy of returning such lands to former white owners. Soon Howard and his agents were under pressure not to assist the free people, but to coerce them into working for landlords And yet, however tarnished the record, the Bureau was still recalled by W. E. B. DuBois for its "bright promise."Yankee Stepfather provides a revealing, and troubling, picture of the complex relationship of African Americans to their government at a crucial juncture in American history. In a new foreword to this edition, William S. McFeely places his book, first published in 1968, in its place in the scholarship on race relations of the past quarter-century
About the author
William S. McFeely is Abraham Baldwin Professor of the Humanities, Emeritus, at the University of Georgia. He is the author of
Yankee Stepfather: General O. O. Howard and the Freedmen;
Grant: A Biography, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the Parkman Prize;
Frederick Douglass, which received the Lincoln Prize;
Sapelo's People: A Long Walk into Freedom; and
Proximity to Death.
