Louisiana Law Review Volume 79 Number 1 The Fourteenth Amendment: 150 Years Later Article 6 A Symposium of the Louisiana Law Review Fall 2018 1-24-2019 “To This Tribunal the Freedman Has Turned”: The Freedmen’sBureau’s Judicial Powers and the Origins of the FourteenthAmendment Hon. Bernice B. Donald Pablo J. Davis Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.law.lsu.edu/lalrev Part of the Law Commons Repository Citation Hon. Bernice B. Donald and Pablo J. Davis, “To This Tribunal the Freedman Has Turned”: The Freedmen’sBureau’s Judicial Powers and the Origins of the FourteenthAmendment, 79 La. L. Rev. (2019) Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.lsu.edu/lalrev/vol79/iss1/6 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Law Reviews and Journals at LSU Law Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Louisiana Law Review by an authorized editor of LSU Law Digital Commons. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. “To This Tribunal the Freedman Has Turned”: The Freedmen’s Bureau’s Judicial Powers and the Origins of the Fourteenth Amendment Hon. Bernice B. Donald* and Pablo J. Davis** TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ...................................................................................... 2 I. Wartime Genesis of the Bureau ....................................................... 5 A. Forerunners ................................................................................ 6 B. Creation of the Bureau ............................................................... 9 II. The Bureau’s Original Judicial Powers .......................................... 13 A. Judicial Powers Under the First Freedmen’s Bureau Act ............................................................................... 13 B. Cession and Reassertion of Jurisdiction .................................. 18 III. The Battle Over the Second Freedmen’s Bureau Act .................... 20 A. Challenges to the Bureau’s Judicial Powers ............................ 20 B.