Each assistant commissioner was aided by a headquarters staff and had under his jurisdiction in each state various district, county, and local agents, with a special corps of school officials, who were usually teachers and missionaries belonging to religious and charitable societies.

The local agents were recruited from the members of the Veteran Reserve Corps, the subordinate officers and non-commissioned officers of the army, mustered-out soldiers, officers of Negro troops, preachers, teachers, and Northern civilians who had come South.

As a class these agents were not competent persons to guide the blacks in the ways of liberty or to arbitrate differences between the races.

There were many exceptions, but the Southern view as expressed by General Wade Hampton had only too much foundation: "There MAY be," he said, "an honest man connected with the Bureau." John Minor Botts, a Virginian who had remained loyal to the Union, asserted that many of the agents were good men who did good work but that trouble resulted from the ignorance and fanaticism of others.

The minority members of the Ku Klux Committee condemned the agents as being "generally of a class of fanatics without character or responsibility." The chief activities of the Bureau included the following five branches: relief work for both races; the regulation of Negro labor; the administration of justice in cases concerning Negroes; the management of abandoned and confiscated property; and the support of schools for the Negroes.
The relief work which was carried on for more than four years consisted of caring for sick Negroes who were within reach of the hospitals, furnishing food and sometimes clothing and shelter to destitute blacks and whites, and transporting refugees of both races back to their homes.
Nearly a hundred hospitals and clinics were established, and half a million patients were treated.