Personnel sustainment has been an official mandate of the Adjutant General’s Corps for over a century, but in point of fact the Corps has almost always been tasked with the sorts of missions that contribute to this goal. A prime example of this took place during the Civil War, when President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation created the opportunity for the Union Army to augment its ranks with freed African-Americans from the Confederacy who wished to join in the fight to bring institutional slavery to an end.
In March, 1863, Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas was dispatched by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to recruit African-Americans to volunteer for service in the Union Army. Establishing the War Department’s Bureau of Colored Troops, Thomas subsequently went on to recruit nearly half of the 180,000 African-American soldiers who eventually served with Union forces before the war’s conclusion in 1865.
It might have been this success that led to the Adjutant General’s Corps Department being assigned the mission of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands seven year later. Colloquially referred to as the “Freedman’s Bureau,” this agency had been created in oversaw relief, assistance, and education efforts aimed at freed slaves and refugees.
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When it was abolished in 1872, the Adjutant General’s Department took over those functions that had been left intact, including the filing of claims for African-Americans to received pensions, bounties, and back pay. The Department handled these matters so expeditiously that the Army ordered it to form a military school in 1881; by the next year, nearly 1,000 enlisted soldiers and 1,110 children were enrolled in the program.