The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line;
the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and
Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. It was a phase of this
problem that caused the Civil War; and however much they who marched
south and north in 1861 may have fixed on the technical points of union
and local autonomy as a shibboleth, all nevertheless knew, as we know,
that the question of Negro slavery was the deeper cause of the conflict.
Curious it was, too, how this deeper question ever forced itself to the
surface, despite effort and disclaimer. No sooner had Northern armies
touched Southern soil than this old question, newly guised, sprang
from the earth,--What shall be done with slaves? Peremptory military
commands, this way and that, could not answer the query; the
Emancipation Proclamation seemed but to broaden and intensify the
difficulties; and so at last there arose in the South a government of
men called the Freedmen's Bureau, which lasted, legally, from 1865 to
1872, but in a sense from 1861 to 1876, and which sought to settle the
Negro problems in the United States of America.
It is the aim of this essay to study the Freedmen's Bureau,--the
occasion of its rise, the character of its work, and its final success
and failure,--not only as a part of American history, but above all as
one of the most singular and interesting of the attempts made by a great
nation to grapple with vast problems of race and social condition.
No sooner had the armies, east and west, penetrated Virginia and
Tennessee than fugitive slaves appeared within their lines. They came at
night, when the flickering camp fires of the blue hosts shone like vast
unsteady stars along the black horizon: old men, and thin, with gray
and tufted hair; women with frightened eyes, dragging whimpering,
hungry children; men and girls, stalwart and gaunt,--a horde of starving
vagabonds, homeless, helpless, and pitiable in their dark distress. Two
methods of treating these newcomers seemed equally logical to opposite
sorts of minds. Said some, "We have nothing to do with slaves."
"Hereafter," commanded Halleck, "no slaves should be allowed to come
into your lines at all; if any come without your knowledge, when owners
call for them, deliver them." But others said, "We take grain and fowl;
why not slaves?" Whereupon Fremont, as early as August, 1861, declared
the slaves of Missouri rebels free. Such radical action was quickly
countermanded, but at the same time the opposite policy could not be
enforced; some of the black refugees declared themselves freemen, others
showed their masters had deserted them, and still others were captured
with forts and plantations. Evidently, too, slaves were a source
of strength to the Confederacy, and were being used as laborers and
producers. "They constitute a military resource," wrote the Secretary of
War, late in 1861; "and being such, that they should not be turned over
to the enemy is too plain to discuss." So the tone of the army chiefs
changed, Congress forbade the rendition of fugitives, and Butler's
"contrabands" were welcomed as military laborers. This complicated
rather than solved the problem; for now the scattering fugitives became
a steady stream, which flowed faster as the armies marched.
Then the long-headed man, with care-chiseled face, who sat in the White
House, saw the inevitable, and emancipated the slaves of rebels on New
Year's, 1863. A month later Congress called earnestly for the Negro
soldiers whom the act of July, 1862, had half grudgingly allowed to
enlist. Thus the barriers were leveled, and the deed was done. The
stream of fugitives swelled to a flood, and anxious officers kept
inquiring: "What must be done with slaves arriving almost daily? Am I to
find food and shelter for women and children?"
It was a Pierce of Boston who pointed out the way, and thus became in
a sense the founder of the Freedmen's Bureau. Being specially detailed
from the ranks to care for the freedmen at Fortress Monroe, he afterward
founded the celebrated Port Royal experiment and started the Freedmen's
Aid Societies. Thus, under the timid Treasury officials and bold army
officers, Pierce's plan widened and developed. At first, the able-bodied
men were enlisted as soldiers or hired as laborers, the women
and children were herded into central camps under guard, and
"superintendents of contrabands" multiplied here and there. Centres
of massed freedmen arose at Fortress Monroe, Va., Washington, D. C.,
Beaufort and Port Royal, S. C., New Orleans, La., Vicksburg and Corinth,
Miss., Columbus, Ky., Cairo, Ill., and elsewhere, and the army chaplains
found here new and fruitful fields.
Then came the Freedmen's Aid Societies, born of the touching appeals for
relief and help from these centres of distress. There was the American
Missionary Association, sprung from the Amistad, and now full grown for
work, the various church organizations, the National Freedmen's Relief
Association, the American Freedmen's Union, the Western Freedmen's
Aid Commission,--in all fifty or more active organizations, which sent
clothes, money, school-books, and teachers southward. All they did was
needed, for the destitution of the freedmen was often reported as "too
appalling for belief," and the situation was growing daily worse rather
than better.
And daily, too, it seemed more plain that this was no ordinary matter of
temporary relief, but a national crisis; for here loomed a labor problem
of vast dimensions. Masses of Negroes stood idle, or, if they worked
spasmodically, were never sure of pay; and if perchance they received
pay, squandered the new thing thoughtlessly. In these and in other
ways were camp life and the new liberty demoralizing the freedmen. The
broader economic organization thus clearly demanded sprang up here and
there as accident and local conditions determined. Here again Pierce's
Port Royal plan of leased plantations and guided workmen pointed out the
rough way. In Washington, the military governor, at the urgent appeal of
the superintendent, opened confiscated estates to the cultivation of
the fugitives, and there in the shadow of the dome gathered black farm
villages. General Dix gave over estates to the freedmen of Fortress
Monroe, and so on through the South. The government and the benevolent
societies furnished the means of cultivation, and the Negro turned again
slowly to work. The systems of control, thus started, rapidly grew, here
and there, into strange little governments, like that of General
Banks in Louisiana, with its 90,000 black subjects, its 50,000 guided
laborers, and its annual budget of $100,000 and more. It made out
4000 pay rolls, registered all freedmen, inquired into grievances and
redressed them, laid and collected taxes, and established a system of
public schools. So too Colonel Eaton, the superintendent of Tennessee
and Arkansas, ruled over 100,000, leased and cultivated 7000 acres of
cotton land, and furnished food for 10,000 paupers. In South Carolina
was General Saxton, with his deep interest in black folk. He succeeded
Pierce and the Treasury officials, and sold forfeited estates, leased
abandoned plantations, encouraged schools, and received from Sherman,
after the terribly picturesque march to the sea, thousands of the
wretched camp followers.
Three characteristic things one might have seen in Sherman's raid
through Georgia, which threw the new situation in deep and shadowy
relief: the Conqueror, the Conquered, and the Negro. Some see all
significance in the grim front of the destroyer, and some in the bitter
sufferers of the lost cause. But to me neither soldier nor fugitive
speaks with so deep a meaning as that dark and human cloud that clung
like remorse on the rear of those swift columns, swelling at times to
half their size, almost engulfing and choking them. In vain were they
ordered back, in vain were bridges hewn from beneath their feet; on
they trudged and writhed and surged, until they rolled into Savannah,
a starved and naked horde of tens of thousands. There too came the
characteristic military remedy: "The islands from Charleston south, the
abandoned ricefields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the
sea, and the country bordering the St. John's River, Florida, are
reserved and set apart for the settlement of Negroes now made free by
act of war." So read the celebrated field order.
All these experiments, orders, and systems were bound to attract and
perplex the government and the nation. Directly after the Emancipation
Proclamation, Representative Eliot had introduced a bill creating a
Bureau of Emancipation, but it was never reported. The following June,
a committee of inquiry, appointed by the Secretary of War, reported
in favor of a temporary bureau for the "improvement, protection,
and employment of refugee freedmen," on much the same lines as were
afterward followed. Petitions came in to President Lincoln from
distinguished citizens and organizations, strongly urging a
comprehensive and unified plan of dealing with the freedmen, under a
bureau which should be "charged with the study of plans and execution of
measures for easily guiding, and in every way judiciously and humanely
aiding, the passage of our emancipated and yet to be emancipated blacks
from the old condition of forced labor to their new state of voluntary
industry."
Some half-hearted steps were early taken by the government to put both
freedmen and abandoned estates under the supervision of the Treasury
officials. Laws of 1863 and 1864 directed them to take charge of and
lease abandoned lands for periods not exceeding twelve months, and to
"provide in such leases or otherwise for the employment and general
welfare" of the freedmen. Most of the army officers looked upon this
as a welcome relief from perplexing "Negro affairs;" but the Treasury
hesitated and blundered, and although it leased large quantities of land
and employed many Negroes, especially along the Mississippi, yet it
left the virtual control of the laborers and their relations to their
neighbors in the hands of the army.
In March, 1864, Congress at last turned its attention to the subject,
and the House passed a bill, by a majority of two, establishing a Bureau
for Freedmen in the War Department. Senator Sumner, who had charge of
the bill in the Senate, argued that freedmen and abandoned lands ought
to be under the same department, and reported a substitute for the House
bill, attaching the Bureau to the Treasury Department. This bill passed,
but too late for action in the House. The debate wandered over the
whole policy of the administration and the general question of slavery,
without touching very closely the specific merits of the measure in
hand.
Meantime the election took place, and the administration, returning from
the country with a vote of renewed confidence, addressed itself to the
matter more seriously. A conference between the houses agreed upon a
carefully drawn measure which contained the chief provisions of
Charles Sumner's bill, but made the proposed organization a department
independent of both the War and Treasury officials. The bill was
conservative, giving the new department "general superintendence of all
freedmen." It was to "establish regulations" for them, protect them,
lease them lands, adjust their wages, and appear in civil and military
courts as their "next friend." There were many limitations attached
to the powers thus granted, and the organization was made permanent.
Nevertheless, the Senate defeated the bill, and a new conference
committee was appointed. This committee reported a new bill, February
28, which was whirled through just as the session closed, and which
became the act of 1865 establishing in the War Department a "Bureau of
Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands."
This last compromise was a hasty bit of legislation, vague and uncertain
in outline. A Bureau was created, "to continue during the present War
of Rebellion, and for one year thereafter," to which was given "the
supervision and management of all abandoned lands, and the control of
all subjects relating to refugees and freedmen," under "such rules and
regulations as may be presented by the head of the Bureau and approved
by the President." A commissioner, appointed by the President and
Senate, was to control the Bureau, with an office force not exceeding
ten clerks. The President might also appoint commissioners in the
seceded states, and to all these offices military officials might be
detailed at regular pay. The Secretary of War could issue rations,
clothing, and fuel to the destitute, and all abandoned property was
placed in the hands of the Bureau for eventual lease and sale to
ex-slaves in forty-acre parcels.
Thus did the United States government definitely assume charge of
the emancipated Negro as the ward of the nation. It was a tremendous
undertaking. Here, at a stroke of the pen, was erected a government
of millions of men,--and not ordinary men, either, but black men
emasculated by a peculiarly complete system of slavery, centuries old;
and now, suddenly, violently, they come into a new birthright, at a time
of war and passion, in the midst of the stricken, embittered population
of their former masters. Any man might well have hesitated to assume
charge of such a work, with vast responsibilities, indefinite powers,
and limited resources. Probably no one but a soldier would have answered
such a call promptly; and indeed no one but a soldier could be called,
for Congress had appropriated no money for salaries and expenses.
Less than a month after the weary emancipator passed to his rest,
his successor assigned Major General Oliver O. Howard to duty
as commissioner of the new Bureau. He was a Maine man, then only
thirty-five years of age. He had marched with Sherman to the sea, had
fought well at Gettysburg, and had but a year before been assigned to
the command of the Department of Tennessee. An honest and sincere
men, with rather too much faith in human nature, little aptitude
for systematic business and intricate detail, he was nevertheless
conservative, hard-working, and, above all, acquainted at first-hand
with much of the work before him. And of that work it has been truly
said, "No approximately correct history of civilization can ever be
written which does not throw out in bold relief, as one of the great
landmarks of political and social progress, the organization and
administration of the Freedmen's Bureau."
On May 12, 1865, Howard was appointed, and he assumed the duties of his
office promptly on the 15th, and began examining the field of work. A
curious mess he looked upon: little despotisms, communistic experiments,
slavery, peonage, business speculations, organized charity, unorganized
almsgiving,--all reeling on under the guise of helping the freedman, and
all enshrined in the smoke and blood of war and the cursing and silence
of angry men. On May 19 the new government--for a government it really
was--issued its constitution; commissioners were to be appointed in each
of the seceded states, who were to take charge of "all subjects relating
to refugees and freedmen," and all relief and rations were to be given
by their consent alone. The Bureau invited continued cooperation with
benevolent societies, and declared, "It will be the object of all
commissioners to introduce practicable systems of compensated labor,"
and to establish schools. Forthwith nine assistant commissioners were
appointed. They were to hasten to their fields of work; seek gradually
to close relief establishments, and make the destitute self-supporting;
act as courts of law where there were no courts, or where Negroes were
not recognized in them as free; establish the institution of marriage
among ex-slaves, and keep records; see that freedmen were free to
choose their employers, and help in making fair contracts for them; and
finally, the circular said, "Simple good faith, for which we hope on
all hands for those concerned in the passing away of slavery, will
especially relieve the assistant commissioners in the discharge of their
duties toward the freedmen, as well as promote the general welfare."
No sooner was the work thus started, and the general system and local
organization in some measure begun, than two grave difficulties appeared
which changed largely the theory and outcome of Bureau work. First,
there were the abandoned lands of the South. It had long been the more
or less definitely expressed theory of the North that all the chief
problems of emancipation might be settled by establishing the slaves on
the forfeited lands of their masters,--a sort of poetic justice, said
some. But this poetry done into solemn prose meant either wholesale
confiscation of private property in the South, or vast appropriations.
Now Congress had not appropriated a cent, and no sooner did the
proclamations of general amnesty appear than the 800,000 acres of
abandoned lands in the hands of the Freedmen's Bureau melted quickly
away. The second difficulty lay in perfecting the local organization of
the Bureau throughout the wide field of work. Making a new machine and
sending out officials of duly ascertained fitness for a great work of
social reform is no child's task; but this task was even harder, for
a new central organization had to be fitted on a heterogeneous and
confused but already existing system of relief and control of ex-slaves;
and the agents available for this work must be sought for in an army
still busy with war operations,--men in the very nature of the case
ill fitted for delicate social work,--or among the questionable camp
followers of an invading host. Thus, after a year's work, vigorously as
it was pushed, the problem looked even more difficult to grasp and solve
than at the beginning. Nevertheless, three things that year's work did,
well worth the doing: it relieved a vast amount of physical suffering;
it transported 7000 fugitives from congested centres back to the
farm; and, best of all, it inaugurated the crusade of the New England
schoolma'am.
The annals of this Ninth Crusade are yet to be written, the tale of a
mission that seemed to our age far more quixotic than the quest of
St. Louis seemed to his. Behind the mists of ruin and rapine waved the
calico dresses of women who dared, and after the hoarse mouthings of
the field guns rang the rhythm of the alphabet. Rich and poor they were,
serious and curious. Bereaved now of a father, now of a brother, now of
more than these, they came seeking a life work in planting New England
schoolhouses among the white and black of the South. They did their work
well. In that first year they taught 100,000 souls, and more.
Evidently, Congress must soon legislate again on the hastily organized
Bureau, which had so quickly grown into wide significance and vast
possibilities. An institution such as that was well-nigh as difficult to
end as to begin. Early in 1866 Congress took up the matter, when Senator
Trumbull, of Illinois, introduced a bill to extend the Bureau and
enlarge its powers. This measure received, at the hands of Congress,
far more thorough discussion and attention than its predecessor. The war
cloud had thinned enough to allow a clearer conception of the work of
emancipation. The champions of the bill argued that the strengthening of
the Freedmen's Bureau was still a military necessity; that it was needed
for the proper carrying out of the Thirteenth Amendment, and was a work
of sheer justice to the ex-slave, at a trifling cost to the government.
The opponents of the measure declared that the war was over, and the
necessity for war measures past; that the Bureau, by reason of its
extraordinary powers, was clearly unconstitutional in time of peace,
and was destined to irritate the South and pauperize the freedmen, at a
final cost of possibly hundreds of millions. Two of these arguments
were unanswered, and indeed unanswerable: the one that the extraordinary
powers of the Bureau threatened the civil rights of all citizens; and
the other that the government must have power to do what manifestly
must be done, and that present abandonment of the freedmen meant their
practical enslavement. The bill which finally passed enlarged and made
permanent the Freedmen's Bureau. It was promptly vetoed by President
Johnson, as "unconstitutional," "unnecessary," and "extrajudicial," and
failed of passage over the veto. Meantime, however, the breach between
Congress and the President began to broaden, and a modified form of the
lost bill was finally passed over the President's second veto, July 16.
The act of 1866 gave the Freedmen's Bureau its final form,--the form by
which it will be known to posterity and judged of men. It extended
the existence of the Bureau to July, 1868; it authorized additional
assistant commissioners, the retention of army officers mustered out
of regular service, the sale of certain forfeited lands to freedmen
on nominal terms, the sale of Confederate public property for Negro
schools, and a wider field of judicial interpretation and cognizance.
The government of the un-reconstructed South was thus put very largely
in the hands of the Freedmen's Bureau, especially as in many cases
the departmental military commander was now made also assistant
commissioner. It was thus that the Freedmen's Bureau became a
full-fledged government of men. It made laws, executed them and
interpreted them; it laid and collected taxes, defined and punished
crime, maintained and used military force, and dictated such measures
as it thought necessary and proper for the accomplishment of its varied
ends. Naturally, all these powers were not exercised continuously nor to
their fullest extent; and yet, as General Howard has said, "scarcely any
subject that has to be legislated upon in civil society failed, at one
time or another, to demand the action of this singular Bureau."
To understand and criticise intelligently so vast a work, one must not
forget an instant the drift of things in the later sixties: Lee
had surrendered, Lincoln was dead, and Johnson and Congress were at
loggerheads; the Thirteenth Amendment was adopted, the Fourteenth
pending, and the Fifteenth declared in force in 1870. Guerrilla raiding,
the ever present flickering after-flame of war, was spending its force
against the Negroes, and all the Southern land was awakening as from
some wild dream to poverty and social revolution. In a time of perfect
calm, amid willing neighbors and streaming wealth, the social uplifting
of 4,000,000 slaves to an assured and self-sustaining place in the body
politic and economic would have been an herculean task; but when to the
inherent difficulties of so delicate and nice a social operation were
added the spite and hate of conflict, the Hell of War; when suspicion
and cruelty were rife, and gaunt Hunger wept beside Bereavement,--in
such a case, the work of any instrument of social regeneration was in
large part foredoomed to failure. The very name of the Bureau stood for
a thing in the South which for two centuries and better men had refused
even to argue,--that life amid free Negroes was simply unthinkable, the
maddest of experiments. The agents which the Bureau could command varied
all the way from unselfish philanthropists to narrow-minded busybodies
and thieves; and even though it be true that the average was far better
than the worst, it was the one fly that helped to spoil the ointment.
Then, amid all this crouched the freed slave, bewildered between friend
and foe. He had emerged from slavery: not the worst slavery in the
world, not a slavery that made all life unbearable,--rather, a
slavery that had here and there much of kindliness, fidelity, and
happiness,--but withal slavery, which, so far as human aspiration and
desert were concerned, classed the black man and the ox together. And
the Negro knew full well that, whatever their deeper convictions may
have been, Southern men had fought with desperate energy to perpetuate
this slavery, under which the black masses, with half-articulate
thought, had writhed and shivered. They welcomed freedom with a cry.
They fled to the friends that had freed them. They shrank from the
master who still strove for their chains. So the cleft between the white
and black South grew. Idle to say it never should have been; it was as
inevitable as its results were pitiable. Curiously incongruous elements
were left arrayed against each other: the North, the government, the
carpetbagger, and the slave, here; and there, all the South that was
white, whether gentleman or vagabond, honest man or rascal, lawless
murderer or martyr to duty.
Thus it is doubly difficult to write of this period calmly, so intense
was the feeling, so mighty the human passions, that swayed and blinded
men. Amid it all two figures ever stand to typify that day to coming
men: the one a gray-haired gentleman, whose fathers had quit themselves
like men, whose sons lay in nameless graves, who bowed to the evil of
slavery because its abolition boded untold ill to all; who stood at
last, in the evening of life, a blighted, ruined form, with hate in his
eyes. And the other, a form hovering dark and mother-like, her awful
face black with the mists of centuries, had aforetime bent in love over
her white master's cradle, rocked his sons and daughters to sleep, and
closed in death the sunken eyes of his wife to the world; ay, too, had
laid herself low to his lust and borne a tawny man child to the world,
only to see her dark boy's limbs scattered to the winds by midnight
marauders riding after Damned Niggers. These were the saddest sights
of that woeful day; and no man clasped the hands of these two passing
figures of the present-past; but hating they went to their long home,
and hating their children's children live to-day.
Here, then, was the field of work for the Freedmen's Bureau; and since,
with some hesitation, it was continued by the act of 1868 till 1869, let
us look upon four years of its work as a whole. There were, in 1868, 900
Bureau officials scattered from Washington to Texas, ruling, directly
and indirectly, many millions of men. And the deeds of these rulers
fall mainly under seven heads,--the relief of physical suffering, the
overseeing of the beginnings of free labor, the buying and selling
of land, the establishment of schools, the paying of bounties, the
administration of justice, and the financiering of all these activities.
Up to June, 1869, over half a million patients had been treated by
Bureau physicians and surgeons, and sixty hospitals and asylums had
been in operation. In fifty months of work 21,000,000 free rations were
distributed at a cost of over $4,000,000,--beginning at the rate of
30,000 rations a day in 1865, and discontinuing in 1869. Next came the
difficult question of labor. First, 30,000 black men were transported
from the refuges and relief stations back to the farms, back to the
critical trial of a new way of working. Plain, simple instructions went
out from Washington,--the freedom of laborers to choose employers, no
fixed rates of wages, no peonage or forced labor. So far so good; but
where local agents differed toto coelo in capacity and character, where
the personnel was continually changing, the outcome was varied. The
largest element of success lay in the fact that the majority of
the freedmen were willing, often eager, to work. So contracts were
written,--50,000 in a single state,--laborers advised, wages guaranteed,
and employers supplied. In truth, the organization became a vast labor
bureau; not perfect, indeed,--notably defective here and there,--but on
the whole, considering the situation, successful beyond the dreams of
thoughtful men. The two great obstacles which confronted the officers at
every turn were the tyrant and the idler: the slaveholder, who believed
slavery was right, and was determined to perpetuate it under another
name; and the freedman, who regarded freedom as perpetual rest. These
were the Devil and the Deep Sea.
In the work of establishing the Negroes as peasant proprietors the
Bureau was severely handicapped, as I have shown. Nevertheless,
something was done. Abandoned lands were leased so long as they remained
in the hands of the Bureau, and a total revenue of $400,000 derived from
black tenants. Some other lands to which the nation had gained title
were sold, and public lands were opened for the settlement of the few
blacks who had tools and capital. The vision of landowning, however,
the righteous and reasonable ambition for forty acres and a mule
which filled the freedmen's dreams, was doomed in most cases to
disappointment. And those men of marvelous hind-sight, who to-day are
seeking to preach the Negro back to the soil, know well, or ought to
know, that it was here, in 1865, that the finest opportunity of binding
the black peasant to the soil was lost. Yet, with help and striving, the
Negro gained some land, and by 1874, in the one state of Georgia, owned
near 350,000 acres.
The greatest success of the Freedmen's Bureau lay in the planting of
the free school among Negroes, and the idea of free elementary education
among all classes in the South. It not only called the schoolmistress
through the benevolent agencies, and built them schoolhouses, but it
helped discover and support such apostles of human development as Edmund
Ware, Erastus Cravath, and Samuel Armstrong. State superintendents of
education were appointed, and by 1870 150,000 children were in school.
The opposition to Negro education was bitter in the South, for the South
believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro. And the South was
not wholly wrong; for education among all kinds of men always has
had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of
dissatisfaction and discontent. Nevertheless, men strive to know. It was
some inkling of this paradox, even in the unquiet days of the Bureau,
that allayed an opposition to human training, which still to-day lies
smouldering, but not flaming. Fisk, Atlanta, Howard, and Hampton were
founded in these days, and nearly $6,000,000 was expended in five
years for educational work, $750,000 of which came from the freedmen
themselves.
Such contributions, together with the buying of land and various other
enterprises, showed that the ex-slave was handling some free capital
already. The chief initial source of this was labor in the army, and his
pay and bounty as a soldier. Payments to Negro soldiers were at first
complicated by the ignorance of the recipients, and the fact that the
quotas of colored regiments from Northern states were largely filled by
recruits from the South, unknown to their fellow soldiers. Consequently,
payments were accompanied by such frauds that Congress, by joint
resolution in 1867, put the whole matter in the hands of the Freedmen's
Bureau. In two years $6,000,000 was thus distributed to 5000 claimants,
and in the end the sum exceeded $8,000,000. Even in this system, fraud
was frequent; but still the work put needed capital in the hands of
practical paupers, and some, at least, was well spent.
The most perplexing and least successful part of the Bureau's work lay
in the exercise of its judicial functions. In a distracted land where
slavery had hardly fallen, to keep the strong from wanton abuse of the
weak, and the weak from gloating insolently over the half-shorn strength
of the strong, was a thankless, hopeless task. The former masters of
the land were peremptorily ordered about, seized and imprisoned, and
punished over and again, with scant courtesy from army officers. The
former slaves were intimidated, beaten, raped, and butchered by angry
and revengeful men. Bureau courts tended to become centres simply for
punishing whites, while the regular civil courts tended to become solely
institutions for perpetuating the slavery of blacks. Almost every law
and method ingenuity could devise was employed by the legislatures to
reduce the Negroes to serfdom,--to make them the slaves of the state,
if not of individual owners; while the Bureau officials too often were
found striving to put the "bottom rail on top," and give the freedmen
a power and independence which they could not yet use. It is all well
enough for us of another generation to wax wise with advice to those who
bore the burden in the heat of the day. It is full easy now to see that
the man who lost home, fortune, and family at a stroke, and saw his land
ruled by "mules and niggers," was really benefited by the passing of
slavery. It is not difficult now to say to the young freedman, cheated
and cuffed about, who has seen his father's head beaten to a jelly and
his own mother namelessly assaulted, that the meek shall inherit
the earth. Above all, nothing is more convenient than to heap on the
Freedmen's Bureau all the evils of that evil day, and damn it utterly
for every mistake and blunder that was made.
All this is easy, but it is neither sensible nor just. Some one had
blundered, but that was long before Oliver Howard was born; there was
criminal aggression and heedless neglect, but without some system of
control there would have been far more than there was. Had that control
been from within, the Negro would have been reenslaved, to all intents
and purposes. Coming as the control did from without, perfect men and
methods would have bettered all things; and even with imperfect agents
and questionable methods, the work accomplished was not undeserving
of much commendation. The regular Bureau court consisted of one
representative of the employer, one of the Negro, and one of the Bureau.
If the Bureau could have maintained a perfectly judicial attitude,
this arrangement would have been ideal, and must in time have gained
confidence; but the nature of its other activities and the character of
its personnel prejudiced the Bureau in favor of the black litigants, and
led without doubt to much injustice and annoyance. On the other hand, to
leave the Negro in the hands of Southern courts was impossible.
What the Freedmen's Bureau cost the nation is difficult to determine
accurately. Its methods of bookkeeping were not good, and the whole
system of its work and records partook of the hurry and turmoil of
the time. General Howard himself disbursed some $15,000,000 during his
incumbency; but this includes the bounties paid colored soldiers, which
perhaps should not be counted as an expense of the Bureau. In bounties,
prize money, and all other expenses, the Bureau disbursed over
$20,000,000 before all of its departments were finally closed. To this
ought to be added the large expenses of the various departments of
Negro affairs before 1865; but these are hardly extricable from war
expenditures, nor can we estimate with any accuracy the contributions of
benevolent societies during all these years.
Such was the work of the Freedmen's Bureau. To sum it up in brief, we
may say: it set going a system of free labor; it established the black
peasant proprietor; it secured the recognition of black freemen before
courts of law; it founded the free public school in the South. On the
other hand, it failed to establish good will between ex-masters and
freedmen; to guard its work wholly from paternalistic methods
that discouraged self-reliance; to make Negroes landholders in any
considerable numbers. Its successes were the result of hard work,
supplemented by the aid of philanthropists and the eager striving of
black men. Its failures were the result of bad local agents, inherent
difficulties of the work, and national neglect. The Freedmen's
Bureau expired by limitation in 1869, save its educational and bounty
departments. The educational work came to an end in 1872, and General
Howard's connection with the Bureau ceased at that time. The work of
paying bounties was transferred to the adjutant general's office, where
it was continued three or four years longer.
Such an institution, from its wide powers, great responsibilities, large
control of moneys, and generally conspicuous position, was naturally
open to repeated and bitter attacks. It sustained a searching
congressional investigation at the instance of Fernando Wood in 1870. It
was, with blunt discourtesy, transferred from Howard's control, in his
absence, to the supervision of Secretary of War Belknap in 1872, on the
Secretary's recommendation. Finally, in consequence of grave intimations
of wrongdoing made by the Secretary and his subordinates, General Howard
was court-martialed in 1874. In each of these trials, and in other
attacks, the commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau was exonerated from
any willful misdoing, and his work heartily commended. Nevertheless,
many unpleasant things were brought to light: the methods of transacting
the business of the Bureau were faulty; several cases of defalcation
among officials in the field were proven, and further frauds hinted
at; there were some business transactions which savored of dangerous
speculation, if not dishonesty; and, above all, the smirch of the
Freedmen's Bank, which, while legally distinct from, was morally and
practically a part of the Bureau, will ever blacken the record of this
great institution. Not even ten additional years of slavery could have
done as much to throttle the thrift of the freedmen as the mismanagement
and bankruptcy of the savings bank chartered by the nation for their
especial aid. Yet it is but fair to say that the perfect honesty of
purpose and unselfish devotion of General Howard have passed untarnished
through the fire of criticism. Not so with all his subordinates,
although in the case of the great majority of these there were shown
bravery and devotion to duty, even though sometimes linked to narrowness
and incompetency.
The most bitter attacks on the Freedmen's Bureau were aimed not so much
at its conduct or policy under the law as at the necessity for any such
organization at all. Such attacks came naturally from the border states
and the South, and they were summed up by Senator Davis, of Kentucky,
when he moved to entitle the act of 1866 a bill "to promote strife
and conflict between the white and black races... by a grant of
unconstitutional power." The argument was of tremendous strength, but
its very strength was its weakness. For, argued the plain common sense
of the nation, if it is unconstitutional, unpracticable, and futile for
the nation to stand guardian over its helpless wards, then there is left
but one alternative: to make those wards their own guardians by arming
them with the ballot. The alternative offered the nation then was not
between full and restricted Negro suffrage; else every sensible man,
black and white, would easily have chosen the latter. It was rather a
choice between suffrage and slavery, after endless blood and gold had
flowed to sweep human bondage away. Not a single Southern legislature
stood ready to admit a Negro, under any conditions, to the polls; not
a single Southern legislature believed free Negro labor was possible
without a system of restrictions that took all its freedom away; there
was scarcely a white man in the South who did not honestly regard
emancipation as a crime, and its practical nullification as a duty.
In such a situation, the granting of the ballot to the black man was a
necessity, the very least a guilty nation could grant a wronged race.
Had the opposition to government guardianship of Negroes been less
bitter, and the attachment to the slave system less strong, the social
seer can well imagine a far better policy: a permanent Freedmen's
Bureau, with a national system of Negro schools; a carefully supervised
employment and labor office; a system of impartial protection before the
regular courts; and such institutions for social betterment as savings
banks, land and building associations, and social settlements. All this
vast expenditure of money and brains might have formed a great school of
prospective citizenship, and solved in a way we have not yet solved the
most perplexing and persistent of the Negro problems.
That such an institution was unthinkable in 1870 was due in part to
certain acts of the Freedmen's Bureau itself. It came to regard its work
as merely temporary, and Negro suffrage as a final answer to all present
perplexities. The political ambition of many of its agents and proteges
led it far afield into questionable activities, until the South, nursing
its own deep prejudices, came easily to ignore all the good deeds of the
Bureau, and hate its very name with perfect hatred. So the Freedmen's
Bureau died, and its child was the Fifteenth Amendment.
The passing of a great human institution before its work is done, like
the untimely passing of a single soul, but leaves a legacy of striving
for other men. The legacy of the Freedmen's Bureau is the heavy heritage
of this generation. Today, when new and vaster problems are destined to
strain every fibre of the national mind and soul, would it not be well
to count this legacy honestly and carefully? For this much all men know:
despite compromise, struggle, war, and struggle, the Negro is not free.
In the backwoods of the Gulf states, for miles and miles, he may not
leave the plantation of his birth; in well-nigh the whole rural South
the black farmers are peons, bound by law and custom to an economic
slavery, from which the only escape is death or the penitentiary. In
the most cultured sections and cities of the South the Negroes are a
segregated servile caste, with restricted rights and privileges. Before
the courts, both in law and custom, they stand on a different and
peculiar basis. Taxation without representation is the rule of their
political life. And the result of all this is, and in nature must have
been, lawlessness and crime. That is the large legacy of the Freedmen's
Bureau, the work it did not do because it could not.
I have seen a land right merry with the sun; where children sing, and
rolling hills lie like passioned women, wanton with harvest. And there
in the King's Highway sat and sits a figure, veiled and bowed, by which
the traveler's footsteps hasten as they go. On the tainted air broods
fear. Three centuries' thought has been the raising and unveiling of
that bowed human heart, and now, behold, my fellows, a century new
for the duty and the deed. The problem of the twentieth century is the
problem of the color line.