Too Great a Burden to Bear - (Reconstructing America) by Christopher B Bean (Paperback)

About the Book

This work focuses on Bureau agents at a more personal level. The answers illuminate who officials believed qualified-or not-to oversee the freedpeople's transition to freedom. Officials in Texas desired those able to meet emancipation's challenges. That meant northern-born, mature, white men from the middle and upper-middle class, and generally with military experience.

Book Synopsis

In its brief seven-year existence, the Freedmen's Bureau became the epicenter of the debate about Reconstruction. Historians have only recently begun to focus on the Bureau's personnel in Texas, the individual agents termed the "hearts of Reconstruction." Specifically addressing the historiographical debates concerning the character of the Bureau and its sub-assistant commissioners (SACs), Too Great a Burden to Bear sheds new light on the work and reputation of these agents.

Focusing on the agents on a personal level, author Christopher B. Bean reveals the type of man Bureau officials believed qualified to oversee the Freedpeople's transition to freedom. This work shows that each agent, moved by his sense of fairness and ideas of citizenship, gender, and labor, represented the agency's policy in his subdistrict. These men further ensured the former slaves' right to an education and right of mobility, something they never had while in bondage.

Review Quotes

Christopher Bean's Too Great a Burden to Bear makes a significant contribution to Reconstruction studies. Deftly combining storytelling with systematic quantitative analyses of the evidence, Bean offers new information, not just on the agents themselves, but also on the largest issues in Reconstruction historiography.---J. William Harris

...Too Great a Burden to Bear is an interesting and well-written account of the Freedmen's Bureau, its agents, and several years of operations in Texas.-- "Relations Industrielles/Industrial Relations"

Rooted in bureau, census, and
military records, Bean's research is
nothing short of exhaustive...this is a
solid study--accessibly written and
deftly argued.

---Dr. Brlan Matthew Jordan, Civil War News

Bean has added significantly to our understanding of the bureau and its operations in Texas. He also provides a model approach that might be used fruitfully to examine the bureau elsewhere, helping scholarship about the bureau at the local level to move beyond the particular to the general. Anyone interested in the Reconstruction Era in the South, whether scholar or member of the general public, should find this book informative.-- "Southwestern Historical Quarterly"

Steeped in Reconstruction historiography, Bean's work aims to replace stereotypes of agents as either occupying carpetbaggers or corrupt and colluding oppressors of freedpeople.-- "Journal of Southern History"

About the Author

Christopher B. Bean is Assistant Professor of History and Native American Studies at East Central University, Oklahoma.