The educational work of the Bureau was at first confined to cooperation with such Northern religious and benevolent societies as were organizing schools and churches for the Negroes.After the first year, the Bureau extended financial aid and undertook a system of supervision over Negro schools.The teachers employed were Northern whites and Negroes in about equal numbers.

Confiscated Confederate property was devoted to Negro education, and in several states the assistant commissioners collected fees and percentages of the Negroes' wages for the benefit of the schools.In addition the Bureau expended about six million dollars.

The intense dislike which the Southern whites manifested for the Freedmen's Bureau was due in general to their resentment of outside control of domestic affairs and in particular to unavoidable difficulties inherent in the situation.Among the concrete causes of Southern hostility was the attitude of some of the higher officials and many of the lower ones toward the white people.They assumed that the whites were unwilling to accord fair treatment to the blacks in the matter of wages, schools, and justice.An official in Louisiana declared that the whites would exterminate the Negroes if the Bureau were removed.A few months later General Fullerton in the same State reported that trouble was caused by those agents who noisily demanded special privileges for the Negro but who objected to any penalties for his lawlessness and made of the Negroes a pampered class.General Tillson in Georgia predicted the extinction of the "old time Southerner with his hate, cruelty, and malice." General Fisk declared that "there are some of the meanest, unsubjugated and unreconstructed rascally revolutionists in Kentucky that curse the soil of the country...a more select number of vindictive, pro-slavery, rebellious legislators cannot be found than a majority of the Kentucky legislature." There was a disposition to lecture the whites about their sins in regard to slavery and to point out to them how far in their general ignorance and backwardness they fell short of enlightened people.

The Bureau courts were frequently conducted in an "illegal and oppressive manner," with "decided partiality for the colored people, without regard to justice." For this reason they were suspended for a time in Louisiana and Georgia by General Steedman and General Fullerton, and cases were then sent before military courts.Men of the highest character were dragged before the Bureau tribunals upon frivolous complaints, were lectured, abused, ridiculed, and arbitrarily fined or otherwise punished.The jurisdiction of the Bureau courts weakened the civil courts and their frequent interference in trivial matters was not conducive to a return to normal conditions.

The inferior agents, not sufficiently under the control of their superiors, were responsible for a great deal of this bad feeling.Many of them held radical opinions as to the relations of the races, and inculcated these views in their courts, in the schools, and in the new Negro churches.Some were charged with even causing strikes and other difficulties in order to be bought off by the whites.The tendency of their work was to create in the Negroes a pervasive distrust of the whites.