Congress, preoccupied with other national interests and responding to the continued hostility of white Southerners, terminated the bureau in July 1872.
The biggest criticism of the Bureau is that it failed to secure land for the majority of freedmen, thus relegating them to the status of renter, not owner. This economic dependence made freedmen vulnerable to Southern white designs and contributed to the loss of their newly won civil rights.
During its existence, the Freedmen's Bureau was criticized for being an enforcement arm of the Radical Republicans in Congress. Virulent critics in the South condemned it constantly.The Freedmen's Bureau Bill, which established the Freedmen's Bureau on March 3, 1865, as initiated by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, was intended to last for one year after the end of the Civil War.