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 real 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 Negroes? Peremptory
military commands this way and that could not answer the query; the Emancipation Proclamation
seemed but to broaden and intensify the difficulties; and the War Amendments made the Negro
problems of today.
It is the aim of this essay to study the period of history from 1861 to 1872 so far as it relates to
the American Negro. In effect, this tale of the dawn of Freedom is an account of that government
of men called the Freedmen's Bureau -- 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.
The war has naught to do with slaves, cried Congress, the President, and the Nation; and yet 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 campfires 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. Ben Butler, in
Virginia, quickly declared slave property contraband of war, and put the fugitives to work; while
Fremont, in Missouri, declared the slaves free under martial law. Butler's action was approved,
but Fremont's was hastily countermanded, and his successor, Halleck, saw things differently.
"Hereafter," he commanded, "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." Such a policy was
difficult to enforce; some of the black refugees declared themselves freemen, others showed that
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 Secretary Cameron, late in
1861, "and being such, that they should not be turned over to the enemy is too plain to discuss."
So gradually 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 army officers kept inquiring: "What must be done with slaves, arriving almost daily?
Are we 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. He was a firm friend of Secretary Chase;and when, in 1861, the care of slaves
and abandoned lands devolved upon the Treasury officials, Pierce was specially detailed from the
ranks to study the conditions. First, hecared for the refugees at Fortress Monroe; and then, after
Sherman had captured Hilton Head, Pierce was sent there to found his Port Royal experiment of
making free workingmen out of slaves. Before his experiment was barely started, however, the
problem of the fugitives had assumed such proportions that it was taken from the hands of the
overburdened Treasury Department and given to the army officials. Already centers of massed
freedmen were forming at Fortress Monroe, Washington, New Orleans, Vicksburg and Corinth,
Columbus, Ky., and Cairo, Ill., as well as at Port Royal. Army chaplains found here new and
fruitful fields; ''superintendents of contrabands" multiplied, and some attempt at systematic work
was made by enlisting the able-bodied men and giving work to the others.
Then came the Freedmen's Aid societies, born of the touching appeals from Pierce and from these
other centers 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, schoolbooks, 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 daily growing 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 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 it was that 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, south and
west. The government and 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 ninety thousand
black subjects, its fifty thousand guided laborers, and its annual budget of one hundred thousand
dollars and more. It made out four thousand payrolls a year, 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 one
hundred thousand freedmen, leased and cultivated seven thousand acres of cotton land, and fed
ten thousand paupers a year. 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 that 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 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 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 rice fields 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
Number Fifteen."
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
afterwards 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 halfhearted steps were taken to accomplish this, in part, by putting the whole matter again
in charge of the special Treasury agents. 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 greeted this as a welcome relief from perplexing "Negro affairs," and Secretary
Fessenden, July 29, 1864, issued an excellent system of regulations, which were afterward closely
followed by General Howard. Under Treasury agents, large quantities of land were leased in the
Mississippi Valley, and many Negroes were employed; but in August, 1864, the new regulations
were suspended for reasons of ''public policy," and the army was again in control.
Meanwhile Congress had turned its attention to the subject; and in March the House passed a bill
by a majority of two establishing a Bureau for Freedmen in the War Department. Charles 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 by the House. The debates
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. Then the national election took
place; and the administration, with a vote of renewed confidence from the country, addressed
itself to the matter more seriously. A conference between the two branches of Congress agreed
upon a carefully drawn measure which contained the chief provisions of Sumner's bill, but made
the proposed organization a department independent of both the War and the Treasury officials.
The bill was conservative, giving the new department "general superintendence of all freedmen.''
Its purpose 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
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 assistant 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 and 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 but the year before had been assigned to the command of the Department of
Tennessee. An honest man, with too much faith in human nature, little aptitude for business and
intricate detail, he had had large opportunity of becoming acquainted at first hand with much of
the work before him. And of that work it has been truly said that "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 freedmen, and all enshrined in the smoke
and blood of the 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 eight hundred thousand
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 seven thousand fugitives from congested centers 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 one hundred thousand 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. These two 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 re-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 unreconstructed 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 criticize 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 forces 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 four million slaves to an assured and
self-sustaining place in the body politic and economic would have been a 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...
In the work of establishing the Negroes as peasant proprietors, the Bureau was from the first
handicapped and at last absolutely checked. Something was done, and larger things were planned,
abandoned lands were leased so long as they remained in the hands of the Bureau, and a total
revenue of nearly half a million dollars derived from black tenants. Some other lands to which the
nation had gained title were sold on easy terms, and public lands were opened for settlement to
the very few freedmen who had tools and capital. But the vision of "forty acres and a mule" -- the
righteous and reasonable ambition to become a landholder, which the nation had all but
categorically promised the freedmen -- was destined in most cases to bitter disappointment. And
those men of marvelous hindsight who are today seeking to preach the Negro back to the present
peonage of the soil know well, or ought to know, that the opportunity of binding the Negro
peasant willingly to the soil was lost on that day when the Commissioner of the Freedmen's
Bureau had to go to South Carolina and tell the weeping freedmen, after their years of toil, that
their land was not theirs, that there was a mistake -- somewhere. If by 1874 the Georgia Negro
alone owned three hundred and fifty thousand acres of land, it was by grace of his thrift rather
than by bounty of the government.
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 school mistresses through the benevolent agencies and built them schoolhouses, but it
helped discover and support such apostles of human culture as Edmund Ware, Samuel
Armstrong, and Erastus Cravath. The opposition to Negro education in the South was at first
bitter, and showed itself in ashes, insult, and blood; 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. Perhaps some inkling of this paradox even in
the unquiet days of the Bureau, helped the bayonets allay an opposition to human training which
still today lies smoldering in the South, but not flaming. Fisk, Atlanta, Howard, and Hampton
were founded in these days, and six million dollars were expended for educational work, seven
hundred and fifty thousand dollars of which the freedmen themselves gave of their poverty.
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 six
million dollars was thus distributed to five thousand claimants, and in the end the sum exceeded
eight million dollars. 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...
Such was the dawn of Freedom; such was the work of the Freedmen's Bureau, which, summed up
in brief, may be epitomized thus: for some fifteen million dollars, beside the sums spent before
1865, and the dole of benevolent societies, this Bureau set going a system of free labor,
established a beginning of peasant proprietorship, secured the recognition of black freedmen
before courts of law, and founded the free common school in the South. On the other hand, it
failed to begin the establishment of goodwill between ex-masters and freedmen, to guard its work
wholly from paternalistic methods which discouraged self-reliance, and to carry out to any
considerable extent its implied promises to furnish the freedmen with land. 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, the inherent difficulties of the work, and
national neglect.
Such an institution, from its wide powers, great responsibilities, large control of moneys, and
generally conspicuous position, was naturally open to repeated and bitter attack. It sustained a
searching Congressional investigation at the instance of Fernando Wood in 1870. Its archives and
few remaining functions were 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 both of these
trials the Commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau was officially exonerated from any willful
misdoing, and his work commended. Nevertheless, many unpleasant things were brought to
light--the methods of transacting the business of the Bureau were faulty; several cases of
defalcation were proved, and other frauds strongly suspected; there were some business
transactions which savored of dangerous speculation, if not dishonesty; and around it all lay the
smirch of the Freedmen's Bank.
Morally and practically, the Freedmen's Bank was part of the Freedmen's Bureau, although it had
no legal connection with it. With the prestige of the government back of it, and a directing board
of unusual respectability and national reputation, this banking institution had made a remarkable
start in the development of that thrift among black folk which slavery had kept them from
knowing. Then in one sad day came the crash -- all the hard-earned dollars of the freedmen
disappeared; but that was the least of the loss -- all the faith in saving went too, and much of the
faith in men; and that was a loss that a Nation which today sneers at Negro shiftlessness has never
yet made good. Not even ten additional years of slavery could have done so much to throttle the
thrift of the freedmen as the mismanagement and bankruptcy of the series of savings banks
chartered by the Nation for their especial aid. Where all the blame should rest, it is hard to say;
whether the Bureau and the Bank died chiefly by reason of the blows of its selfish friends or the
dark machinations of its foes, perhaps even time will never reveal, for here lies unwritten
history.
Of the foes without the Bureau, the bitterest were those who attacked not so much its conduct or
policy under the law as the necessity for any such institution at all. Such attacks came primarily
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 gathered tremendous
strength South and North; but its very strength was its weakness. For, argued the plain common
sense of the nation, if it is unconstitutional, unpractical, 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. Moreover, the path of the practical politician pointed
the same way; for, argued this opportunist, if we cannot peacefully reconstruct the South with
white votes, we certainly can with black votes. So justice and force joined hands.
The alternative thus offered the nation 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, and the only method of compelling the South to accept the
results of the war. Thus Negro suffrage ended a civil war by beginning a race feud. And some felt
gratitude toward the race thus sacrificed in its swaddling clothes on the altar of national integrity;
and some felt and feel only indifference and contempt.
Had political exigencies been less pressing, the opposition to government guardianship of Negroes
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 fiber 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, 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 Highways 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
a century new for the duty and the deed. The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of
the color line.
APStudent.com | www.apstudent.com