The Wards of the Nation
The negroes at the close of the war were not slaves or serfs, nor were
they citizens. What was to be done with them and for them? The Southern
answer to this question may be found in the so-called "Black Laws,"
which were enacted by the state governments set up by President Johnson.
The views of the dominant North may be discerned in part in the
organization and administration of the Freedmen's Bureau. The two
sections saw the same problem from different angles and their proposed
solutions were of necessity opposed in principle and in practice.
The South desired to fit the emancipated negro race into the new social
order by frankly recognizing his inferiority to the whites. In some
things racial separation was unavoidable. New legislation consequently
must be enacted, because the slave codes were obsolete; because the old
laws made for the small free negro class did not meet present
conditions; and because the emancipated blacks could not be brought
conveniently and at once under laws originally devised for a white
population. The new laws must meet many needs; family life, morals, and
conduct must be regulated; the former slave must be given a status in
court in order that he might be protected in person and property; the
old, the infirm, and the orphans must be cared for; the white race must
be protected from lawless blacks and the blacks from unscrupulous and
violent whites; the negro must have an opportunity for education; and
the roving blacks must be forced to get homes, settle down, and go to
work.
Pending such legislation the affairs of the negro remained in control of
the unpopular Freedmen's Bureau--a "system of espionage," as Judge
Clayton of Alabama called it, and, according to Governor Humphreys of
Mississippi, "a hideous curse" under which white men were persecuted and
pillaged. Judge Memminger of South Carolina, in a letter to President
Johnson, emphasized the fact that the whites of England and the United
States gained civil and political rights through centuries of slow
advancement and that they were far ahead of the people of European
states. Consequently, it would be a mistake to give the freedmen a
status equal to that of the most advanced whites. Rather, let the United
States profit by the experience of the British in their emancipation
policies and arrange a system of apprenticeship for a period of
transition. When the negro should be fit, let him be advanced to
citizenship.
Most Southern leaders agreed that the removal of the master's protection
was a real loss to the negro which must be made good to some extent by
giving the negro a status in court and by accepting negro testimony in
all cases in which blacks were concerned. The North Carolina committee
on laws for freedmen agreed with objectors that "there are comparatively
few of the slaves lately freed who are honest" and truthful, but
maintained that the negroes were capable of improvement. The chief
executives of Mississippi and Florida declared that there was no danger
to the whites in admitting the more or less unreliable negro testimony,
for the courts and juries would in every case arrive at a proper
valuation of it. Governors Marvin of Florida and Humphreys of
Mississippi advocated practical civil equality, while in North Carolina
and several other States there was a disposition to admit negro
testimony only in cases in which negroes were concerned. The North
Carolina committee recommended the abolition of whipping as a punishment
unfit for free people, and most States accepted this principle. Even in
1865 the general disposition was to make uniform laws for both races,
except in regard to violation of contracts, immoral conduct, vagrancy,
marriage, schools, and forms of punishment. In some of these matters the
whites were to be more strictly regulated; in others, the negroes.
There was further general agreement that in economic relations both
races must be protected, each from the other; but it is plain that the
leaders believed that the negro had less at stake than the white. The
negro was disposed to be indolent; he knew little of the obligations of
contracts; he was not honest; and he would leave his job at will.
Consequently Memminger recommended apprenticeship for all negroes;
Governor Marvin suggested it for children alone; and others wished it
provided for orphans only. Further, the laws enacted must force the
negroes to settle down, to work, and to hold to contracts. Memminger
showed that, without legislation to enforce contracts and to secure
eviction of those who refused to work, the white planter in the South
was wholly at the mercy of the negro. The plantations were scattered,
the laborers' houses were already occupied, and there was no labor
market to which a planter could go if the laborers deserted his fields.
What would the negro become if these leaders of reconstruction were to
have their way? Something better than a serf, something less than a
citizen--a second degree citizen, perhaps, with legal rights about equal
to those of white women and children. Governor Marvin hoped to make of
the race a good agricultural peasantry; his successor was anxious that
the blacks should be preferred to European immigrants; others agreed
with Memminger that after training and education he might be advanced to
full citizenship.
These opinions are representative of those held by the men who,
Memminger excepted, were placed in charge of affairs by President
Johnson and who were not specially in sympathy with the negroes or with
the planters but rather with the average white. All believed that
emancipation was a mistake, but all agreed that "it is not the negro's
fault" and gave no evidence of a disposition to perpetuate slavery under
another name.
The legislation finally framed showed in its discriminatory features the
combined influence of the old laws for free negroes, the vagrancy laws
of North and South for whites, the customs of slavery times, the British
West Indies legislation for ex-slaves, and the regulations of the United
States War and Treasury Departments and of the Freedmen's Bureau--all
modified and elaborated by the Southern whites. In only two States,
Mississippi and South Carolina, did the legislation bulk large in
quantity; in other States discriminating laws were few; in still other
States none were passed except those defining race and prohibiting
intermarriage.
In all of the state laws there were certain common characteristics,
among which were the following: the descendant of a negro was to be
classed as a negro through the third generation, ¹ even though one
parent in each generation was white; intermarriage of the races was
prohibited; existing slave marriages were declared valid and for the
future marriage was generally made easier for the blacks than for the
whites. In all States the negro was given his day in court, and in cases
relating to negroes his testimony was accepted; in six States he might
testify in any case. When provision was made for schooling, the rule of
race separation was enforced. In Mississippi the "Jim Crow car," or
separate car for negroes, was invented. In several States the negro had
to have a license to carry weapons, to preach, or to engage in trade. In
Mississippi, a negro could own land only in town; in other States he
could purchase land only in the country. Why the difference, no one
knows and probably few knew at the time. Some of the legislation was
undoubtedly hasty and ill-considered.
¹ Fourth in Tennessee.
But the laws relating to apprenticeship, vagrancy, and enforced punitive
employment turned out to be of greater practical importance. On these
subjects the legislation of Mississippi and South Carolina was the most
extreme. In Mississippi negro orphans were to be bound out, preferably
to a former master, if "he or she shall be a suitable person." The
master was given the usual control over apprentices and was bound by the
usual duties, including that of teaching the apprentice. But the
penalties for "enticing away" apprentices were severe. The South
Carolina statute was not essentially different. The vagrancy laws of
these two States were in the main the same for both races, but in
Mississippi the definition of vagrancy was enlarged to include negroes
not at work, those "found unlawfully assembling themselves together,"
and "all white persons assembling themselves with freedmen." It is to be
noted that nearly all punishment for petty offenses took the form of
hiring out, preferably to the former master or employer. The principal
petty offenses were, it would seem, vagrancy and "enticing away"
laborers or apprentices. The South Carolina statute contains some other
interesting provisions. A negro, man or woman, who had enjoyed the
companionship of two or more spouses, must by April 1, 1866, select one
of them as a permanent partner; a farm laborer must "rise at dawn," feed
the animals, care for the property, be quiet and orderly, and "retire at
reasonable hours"; on Sunday the servants must take turns in doing the
necessary work, and they must be respectful and civil to the "master and
his family, guests, and agents"; to engage in skilled labor the negro
must obtain a license. Whipping and the pillory were permitted in
Florida for certain offenses, and in South Carolina the master might
"moderately correct" servants under eighteen years of age. Other
punishments were generally the same for both races, except the hiring
out for petty offenses.
From the Southern point of view none of this legislation was regarded as
a restriction of negro rights but as a wide extension to the negro of
rights never before possessed, an adaptation of the white man's laws to
his peculiar case. It is doubtful whether in some of the States the
authorities believed that there were any discriminatory laws; they
probably overlooked some of the free negro legislation already on the
statute books. In Alabama, for example, General Wager Swayne, the head
of the Freedmen's Bureau, reported that all such laws had either been
dropped by the legislature or had been vetoed by the governor. Yet the
statute books do show some discriminations. There is a marked difference
between earlier and later legislation. The more stringent laws were
enacted before the end of 1865. After New Year's Day had passed and the
negroes had begun to settle down, the legislatures either passed mild
laws or abandoned all special legislation for the negroes. Later in
1866, several States repealed the legislation of 1865.
In so far as the "Black Laws" discriminated against the negro they were
never enforced but were suspended from the beginning by the army and the
Freedmen's Bureau. They had, however, a very important effect upon that
section of Northern opinion which was already suspicious of the good
faith of the Southerners. They were part of a plan, some believed, to
reënslave the negro or at least to create by law a class of serfs. This
belief did much to bring about later radical legislation.
If the "Black Laws" represented the reaction of the Southern
legislatures to racial conditions, the Freedmen's Bureau was the
corresponding result of the interest taken by the North in the welfare
of the negro. It was established just as the war was closing and arose
out of the various attempts to meet the negro problems that arose during
the war. The Bureau had always a dual nature, due in part to its
inheritance of regulations, precedents, and traditions from the various
attempts made during war time to handle the many thousands of negroes
who came under Federal control, and in part to the humanitarian impulses
of 1865, born of a belief in the capacity of the negro for freedom and a
suspicion that the Southern whites intended to keep as much of slavery
as they could. The officials of the Bureau likewise were of two classes:
those in control were for the most part army officers, standing as
arbiters between white and black, usually just and seldom the victims of
their sympathies; but the mass of less responsible officials were men of
inferior ability and character, either blind partisans of the negro or
corrupt and subject to purchase by the whites.
In view of the fact that the Freedmen's Bureau was considered a new
institution in 1865, it is rather remarkable how closely it followed in
organization, purpose, and methods the precedents set during the war by
the officers of the army and the Treasury. In Virginia, General Butler,
in 1861, declared escaped slaves to be "contraband" and proceeded to
organize them into communities for discipline, work, food, and care. His
successors in Virginia and North Carolina, and others in the Sea Islands
of Georgia and South Carolina, extended his plan and arranged a labor
system with fixed wages, hours, and methods of work, and everywhere made
use of the captured or abandoned property of the Confederates. In
Tennessee and Arkansas, Chaplain John Eaton of Grant's army employed
thousands in a modified free labor system; and further down in
Mississippi and Louisiana Generals Grant, Butler, and Banks also put
large numbers of captured slaves to work for themselves and for the
Government. Everywhere, as the numbers of negroes increased, the army
commanders divided the occupied negro regions into districts under
superintendents and other officials, framed labor laws, coöperated with
benevolent societies which gave schooling and medical care to the
blacks, and developed systems of government for them.
The United States Treasury Department, attempting to execute the
confiscation laws for the benefit of the Treasury, appears now and then
as an employer of negro labor on abandoned plantations. Either alone or
in coöperation with the army and charitable associations, it even
supervised negro colonies, and sometimes it assumed practically complete
control of the economic welfare of the negro. This Department introduced
in 1864 an elaborate lessee and trade system. The negro was regarded as
"the ward of the nation," but he was told impressively that "labor is a
public duty and idleness and vagrancy a crime." All wanted him to work:
the Treasury wanted cotton and other crops to sell; the lessees and
speculators wanted to make fortunes by his labor; and the army wanted to
be free from the burden of the idle blacks. In spite of all these
ministrations the negroes suffered much from harsh treatment, neglect,
and unsanitary conditions.
During 1863 and 1864 several influences were urging the establishment of
a national bureau or department to take charge of matters relating to
the African race. Some wished to establish on the borders of the South a
paid labor system, which might later be extended over the entire region,
to get more slaves out of the Confederacy into this free labor
territory, and to prevent immigration of negroes into the North, which,
after the Emancipation Proclamation, was apprehensive of this danger.
Others wished to relieve the army and the treasury officials of the
burden of caring for the blacks and to protect the latter from the
"northern harpies and bloodhounds" who had fastened upon them the lessee
system.
The discussion lasted for two years. The Freedmen's Inquiry Commission,
after a survey of the field in 1863, recommended a consolidation of all
efforts under an organization which should perpetuate the best features
of the old system. But there was much opposition to this plan in
Congress. The negroes would be exploited, objected some; the scheme gave
too much power to the proposed organization, said others; another
objection was urged against the employment of a horde of incompetent and
unscrupulous officeholders, for "the men who go down there and become
your overseers and negro drivers will be your brokendown politicians and
your dilapidated preachers, that description of men who are too lazy to
work and just a little too honest to steal."
As the war drew to a close the advocates of a policy of consolidation in
negro affairs prevailed, and on March 3, 1865, an act was approved
creating in the War Department a Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and
Abandoned Lands. This Bureau was to continue for one year after the
close of the war and it was to control all matters relating to freedmen
and refugees, that is, Unionists who had been driven out of the South.
Food, shelter, and clothing were to be given to the needy, and abandoned
or confiscated property was to be used for or leased to freedmen. At the
head of the Bureau was to be a commissioner with an assistant
commissioner for each of the Southern States. These officials and other
employees must take the "ironclad" oath.
It was planned that the Bureau should have a brief existence, but the
institution and its wards became such important factors in politics that
on July 16, 1866, after a struggle with the President, Congress passed
an act over his veto amplifying the powers of the Bureau and extending
it for two years longer. This continuation of the Bureau was due to many
things: to a belief that former slaveholders were not to be trusted in
dealing with the negroes; to the baneful effect of the "Black Laws" upon
Northern public opinion; to the struggle between the President and
Congress over reconstruction; and to the foresight of radical
politicians who saw in the institution an instrument for the political
instruction of the blacks in the proper doctrines.
The new law was supplementary to the Act of 1865, but its additional
provisions merely endorsed what the Bureau was already doing. It
authorized the issue of medical supplies, confirmed certain sales of
land to negroes, and provided that the promises which Sherman made in
1865 to the Sea Island negroes should be carried out as far as possible
and that no lands occupied by blacks should be restored to the owners
until the crops of 1866 were gathered; it directed the Bureau to
coöperate with private charitable and benevolent associations, and it
authorized the use or sale for school purposes of all confiscated
property; and finally it ordered that the civil equality of the negro be
upheld by the Bureau and its courts when state courts refused to accept
the principle. By later laws the existence of the Bureau was extended to
January 1, 1869, in the unreconstructed States, but its educational and
financial activities were continued until June 20, 1872.
The chief objections to the Bureau from the conservative Northern point
of view were summed up in the President's veto messages. The laws
creating it were based, he asserted, on the theory that a state of war
still existed; there was too great a concentration of power in the hands
of a few individuals who could not be held responsible; with such a
large number of agents ignorant of the country and often working for
their own advantage injustice would inevitably result; in spite of the
fact that the negro everywhere had a status in court, arbitrary
tribunals were established, without jury, without regular procedure or
rules of evidence, and without appeal; the provisions in regard to
abandoned lands amounted to confiscation without a hearing; the negro,
who must in the end work out his own salvation, and who was protected by
the demand for his labor, would be deluded into thinking his future
secure without further effort on his part; although nominally under the
War Department, the Bureau was not subject to military control; it was
practically a great political machine; and, finally, the States most
concerned were not represented in Congress.
The Bureau was soon organized in all the former slaveholding States
except Delaware, with general headquarters in Washington and state
headquarters at the various capitals. General O. O. Howard, who was
appointed commissioner, was a good officer, soft-hearted, honest, pious,
and frequently referred to as "the Christian soldier." He was
fair-minded and not disposed to irritate the Southern whites
unnecessarily, but he was rather suspicious of their intentions toward
the negroes, and he was a believer in the righteousness of the
Freedmen's Bureau. He was not a good business man; and he was not beyond
the reach of politicians. At one time he was seriously disturbed in his
duties by the buzzing of the presidential bee in his bonnet. The members
of his staff were not of his moral stature, and several of them were
connected with commercial and political enterprises which left their
motives open to criticism.
The assistant commissioners were, as a rule, general officers of the
army, though a few were colonels and chaplains. ¹ Nearly half of them
had during the war been associated with the various attempts to handle
the negro problem, and it was these men who shaped the organization of
the Bureau. While few of them were immediately acceptable to the
Southern whites, only ten of them proved seriously objectionable on
account of personality, character, or politics. Among the most able
should be mentioned Generals Schofield, Swayne, Fullerton, Steedman, and
Fessenden, and Colonel John Eaton. The President had little or no
control over the appointment or discipline of the officials and agents
of the Bureau, except possibly by calling some of the higher army
officers back to military service.
¹ They numbered eleven at first and fourteen after July, 1866, and were
changed so often that fifty, in all, served in this rank before January
1, 1869, when the Bureau was practically discontinued.
As a result of General Grant's severe criticism of the arrangement which
removed the Bureau from control by the military establishment, the
military commander was in a few instances also appointed assistant
commissioner. 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. This work was greatly needed, especially
for the old and the infirm, and it was well done. The transportation of
refugees did not reach large proportions, and after 1866 it was
entangled in politics. But the issue of supplies in huge quantities
brought much needed relief though at the same time a certain amount of
demoralization. The Bureau claimed little credit, and is usually given
none, for keeping alive during the fall and winter of 1865-1866
thousands of destitute whites. Yet more than a third of the food issued
was to whites, and without it many would have starved. Numerous
Confederate soldiers on the way home after the surrender were fed by the
Bureau, and in the destitute white districts a great deal of suffering
was relieved and prevented by its operations. The negroes, dwelling for
the most part in regions where labor was in demand, needed relief for a
shorter time, but they were attracted in numbers to the towns by free
food, and it was difficult to get them back to work. The political value
of the free food issues was not generally recognized until later in 1866
and in 1867.
During the first year of the Bureau an important duty of the agents was
the supervision of negro labor and the fixing of wages. Both officials
and planters generally demanded that contracts be written, approved, and
filed in the office of the Bureau. They thought that the negroes would
work better if they were thus bound by contracts. The agents usually
required that the agreements between employer and laborer cover such
points as the nature of the work, the hours, food and clothes, medical
attendance, shelter, and wages. To make wages secure, the laborer was
given a lien on the crop; to secure the planter from loss, unpaid wages
might be forfeited if the laborer failed to keep his part of the
contract. When it dawned upon the Bureau authorities that other systems
of labor had been or might be developed in the South, they permitted
arrangements for the various forms of cash and share renting. But it was
everywhere forbidden to place the negroes under "overseers" or to
subject them to "unwilling apprenticeship" and "compulsory working out
of debts."
The written contract system for laborers did not work out successfully.
The negroes at first were expecting quite other fruits of freedom. One
Mississippi negro voiced what was doubtless the opinion of many when he
declared that he "considered no man free who had to work for a living."
Few negroes would contract for more than three months and none for a
period beyond January 1, 1866, when they expected a division of lands
among the ex-slaves. In spite of the regulations, most worked on oral
agreements. In 1866 nearly all employers threw overboard the written
contract system for labor and permitted oral agreements. Some States had
passed stringent laws for the enforcing of contracts, but in Alabama,
Governor Patton vetoed such legislation on the ground that it was not
needed. General Swayne, the Bureau chief for the State, endorsed the
Governor's action and stated that the negro was protected by his freedom
to leave when mistreated, and the planter, by the need on the part of
the negro for food and shelter. Negroes, he said, were afraid of
contracts and, besides, contracts led to litigation.
In order to safeguard the civil rights of the negroes the Bureau was
given authority to establish courts of its own and to supervise the
action of state courts in cases to which freedmen were parties. The
majority of the assistant commissioners made no attempt to let the state
courts handle negro cases but were accustomed to bring all such cases
before the Bureau or the provost courts of the army. In Alabama, quite
early, and later in North Carolina, Mississippi, and Georgia, the wiser
assistant commissioners arranged for the state courts to handle
freedmen's cases with the understanding that discriminating laws were to
be suspended. General Swayne in so doing declared that he was "unwilling
to establish throughout Alabama courts conducted by persons foreign to
her citizenship and strangers to her laws." The Bureau courts were
informal affairs, consisting usually of one or two administrative
officers. There were no jury, no appeal beyond the assistant
commissioner, no rules of procedure, and no accepted body of law. In
state courts accepted by the Bureau the proceedings in negro cases were
conducted in the same manner as for the whites.
The educational work of the Bureau was at first confined to coöperation
with such Northern religious and benevolent societies as were organizing
schools and churches for the negroes. After the first year the Bureau
extended financial aid and undertook a system of supervision over negro
schools. The teachers employed were Northern whites and negroes in about
equal numbers. Confiscated Confederate property was devoted to negro
education, and in several States the assistant commissioners collected
fees and percentages of the negroes' wages for the benefit of the
schools. In addition the Bureau expended about six million dollars.
The intense dislike which the Southern whites manifested for the
Freedmen's Bureau was due in general to their resentment of outside
control of domestic affairs and in particular to unavoidable
difficulties inherent in the situation. Among the concrete causes of
Southern hostility was the attitude of some of the higher officials and
many of the lower ones toward the white people. They assumed that the
whites were unwilling to accord fair treatment to the blacks in the
matter of wages, schools, and justice. An official in Louisiana declared
that the whites would exterminate the negroes if the Bureau were
removed. A few months later General Fullerton in the same State reported
that trouble was caused by those agents who noisily demanded special
privileges for the negro but who objected to any penalties for his
lawlessness and made of the negroes a pampered class. General Tillson in
Georgia predicted the extinction of the "old time Southerner with his
hate, cruelty, and malice." General Fisk declared that "there are some
of the meanest, unsubjugated and unreconstructed rascally revolutionists
in Kentucky that curse the soil of the country ... a more select number
of vindictive, pro-slavery, rebellious legislators cannot be found than
a majority of the Kentucky legislature." There was a disposition to
lecture the whites about their sins in regard to slavery and to point
out to them how far in their general ignorance and backwardness they
fell short of enlightened people.
The Bureau courts were frequently conducted in an "illegal and
oppressive manner," with "decided partiality for the colored people,
without regard to justice." For this reason they were suspended for a
time in Louisiana and Georgia by General Steedman and General Fullerton,
and cases were then sent before military courts. Men of the highest
character were dragged before the Bureau tribunals upon frivolous
complaints, were lectured, abused, ridiculed, and arbitrarily fined or
otherwise punished. The jurisdiction of the Bureau courts weakened the
civil courts and their frequent interference in trivial matters was not
conducive to a return to normal conditions.
The inferior agents, not sufficiently under the control of their
superiors, were responsible for a great deal of this bad feeling. Many
of them held radical opinions as to the relations of the races, and
inculcated these views in their courts, in the schools, and in the new
negro churches. Some were charged with even causing strikes and other
difficulties in order to be bought off by the whites. The tendency of
their work was to create in the negroes a pervasive distrust of the
whites.
The prevalent delusion in regard to an impending division of the lands
among the blacks had its origin in the operation of the war-time
confiscation laws, in some of the Bureau legislation, and in General
Sherman's Sea Island order, but it was further fostered by the agents
until most blacks firmly believed that each head of a family was to get
"40 acres and a mule." This belief seriously interfered with industry
and resulted also in widespread swindling by rascals who for years made
a practice of selling fraudulent deeds to land with red, white, and blue
sticks to mark off the bounds of a chosen spot on the former master's
plantation. The assistant commissioners labored hard to disabuse the
minds of the negroes, but their efforts were often neutralized by the
unscrupulous attitude of the agents.
As the contest over reconstruction developed in Washington, the
officials of the Bureau soon recognized the political possibilities of
their institution. After mid-year of 1866, the Bureau became a political
machine for the purpose of organizing the blacks into the Union League,
where the rank and file were taught that reënslavement would follow
Democratic victories. Nearly all of the Bureau agents aided in the
administration of the reconstruction acts in 1867 and in the
organization of the new state and local governments and became officials
under the new régime. They were the chief agents in capturing the solid
negro vote for the Republican party.
Neither of the two plans for guiding the freedmen into a place in the
social order--the "Black Laws" and the Freedmen's Bureau--was
successful. The former contained a program which was better suited to
actual conditions and which might have succeeded if it had been given a
fair trial. These laws were a measure of the extent to which the average
white would then go in "accepting the situation" so far as the blacks
were concerned. And on the whole the recognition of negro rights made in
these laws, and made at a time when the whites believed that they were
free to handle the situation, was remarkably fair. The negroes lately
released from slavery were admitted to the enjoyment of the same rights
as the whites as to legal protection of life, liberty, and property, as
to education and as to the family relation, limited only by the clear
recognition of the principles of political inferiority and social
separation. Unhappily this legislation was not put to the test of
practical experience because of the Freedmen's Bureau; it was
nevertheless skillfully used to arouse the dominant Northern party to a
course of action which made impossible any further effort to treat the
race problem with due consideration to actual local conditions.
Much of the work of the Freedmen's Bureau was of only temporary benefit
to both races. The results of its more permanent work were not generally
good. The institution was based upon the assumption that the negro race
must be protected from the white race. In its organization and
administration it was an impossible combination of the practical and the
theoretical, of opportunism and humanitarianism, of common sense and
idealism. It failed to exert a permanently wholesome influence because
its lesser agents were not held to strict accountability by their
superiors. Under these agents the alienation of the two races began, and
the ill feelings then aroused were destined to persist into a long and
troubled future.