The Freedmen’s Bureau

Federal authorities had a terrific problem to deal with in four millions of slaves suddenly let loose. Military commanders found themselves between the devil and the deep sea.

Varied instructions were given to bring order out of chaos. “Freedmen that will use any disrespectful language to their former masters will be severely punished,” is part of a ukase issued by Captain Nunan, at Milledgeville, in fervent if distracted effort for the general weal. By action if not by order, some others settled the matter this way: “Former masters that will use any disrespectful language to their former slaves will be severely punished”; as witness the case where a venerable lady, bearing in her own and that of her husband two of the proudest names in her State, was marched through the streets to answer before a military tribunal the charge of having used offensive language to her cook.

With hordes of negroes pilfering and pillaging, new rulers had an elephant on their hands. No vagrant laws enacted by Southern Legislatures in 1865-6 surpassed in severity many of the early military mandates with penalties for infraction. The strongest argument in palliation of the reconstruction acts is found in these laws which were construed into an attempt to re-enslave the negro. The South had no vagrant class before the war and was provided with no laws to meet conditions of vagrancy which followed emancipation with overwhelming force.Comparing these laws with New England’s, we find that in many respects the former were modelled on the latter, from which the words “ball and chain,” “master and mistress” and the apprentice system, which Mr. Blaine declared so heinous, might well have been borrowed, though New England never faced so grave a vagrancy problem as that which confronted the South.

Negroes flocked to cities, thick as blackbirds. Federal commanders issued orders: “Keep negroes from the cities.” “The Government is feeding too many idlers.” “Make them stay on the plantations.” “Impress upon them the necessity of making a crop, or famine is imminent throughout the South.” “Do not let the young and able-bodied desert their children, sick, and aged.” As well call to order the wild things of the woods! In various places something like the old “patter-roller” system of slavery was adopted by the Federals, wandering negroes being required to show passes from employers, saying why they were abroad.

General Schofield’s Code for the Government of Freedmen in North Carolina (May, 1865) says: “Former masters are constituted guardians of minors in the absence of parents or other near relatives capable of supporting them.” The Radicals made great capital out of a similar provision in Southern vagrancy laws.

Accounts of confusion worse confounded wrung this from the “New York Times” (May 17, 1865): “The horse-stealing, lemonade and cake-vending phase of freedom is destined to brief existence. The negro misunderstands the motives which made the most laborious, hard-working people on the face of the globe clamour for his emancipation. You are free, Sambo, but you must work. Be virtuous, too, O Dinah! ‘Whew! Gor Almighty! bress my soul!’”The “Chicago Times” (July 7, 1865) gives a Western view: “There is chance in this country for philanthropy, a good opening for abolitionists. It is to relieve twenty-eight millions of whites held in cruel bondage by four million blacks, a bondage which retards our growth, distracts our thoughts, absorbs our efforts, drives us to war, ruptures our government, disturbs our tranquillity, and threatens direfully our future. There never was such a race of slaves as we; there never was another people ground so completely in the dust as this nation. Our negro masters crack their whips over our legislators and our religion.”

The Freedmen’s Bureau was created March 3, 1865, for the care and supervision of negroes in Federal lines. Branches were rapidly established throughout the South and invested with almost unlimited powers in matters concerning freedmen. An agency’s efficiency depended upon the agent’s personality. If he were discreet and self-respecting, its influence was wholesome; if he were the reverse, it was a curse. If he were inclined to peculate, the agency gave opportunity; if he were cruel—well, negroes who were hung up by the thumbs, or well annointed with molasses and tied out where flies could find them had opinions.

I recall two stories which show how wide a divergence there might be between the operations of two stations. A planter went to the agent in his vicinity and said: “Captain, I don’t know what to do with the darkeys on my place. They will not work, and are committing depredations on myself and neighbours.” The agent went out and addressed the negroes: “Men, what makes you think you can live without work? The Government is not going to support any people in idleness on account of their complexions. I shall not issue food to another of you. I have charged this planter to bring before me any case of stealing. If you stay on this plantation, you are to work for the owner.”

In a week, the planter reported that they still refused to labour or to leave; property was disappearing, wanton damage was being done; but it was impossible to spot thieves and vandals. The agent, a man of war, went up in a hurry, and his language made the air blue! “If I come again,” was his parting salutation, “I’ll bring my cannon, and if you don’t hoe, plow, or do whatever is required, I’ll blow you all to pieces!” They went to work.

A gentleman of Fauquier tells me: “When I got home from prison, July, 1865, I found good feelings existing between whites and their former slaves; everything was going on as before the war except that negroes were free and received wages. After a while there came down a Bureau Agent who declared all contracts null and void and that no negro should work for a white except under contract written and approved by him. This demoralised the negroes and engendered distrust of whites.”

“If a large planter was making contracts,” I heard Mr. Martin, of the Tennessee Legislature, relate, “the agent would intermeddle. I had to make all mine in the presence of one. These agents had to be bribed to do a white man justice. A negro would not readily get into trouble with a gentleman of means and position when he would make short work of shooting a poor white. Yet the former had owned slaves and the latter had not.”

Planters, making contracts, might have to journey from remote points (sometimes a distance of fifty miles over bad roads), wherever a Bureau was located, whites and blacks suffering expense, and loss of time. Both had to fee the agent. A contract binding on the white was not binding on the negro, who was irresponsible. If the Bureau wrought much mischief, it also wrought good, for there were some whites ready to take advantage of the negro’s ignorance in driving hard bargains with him; sorrowfully be it said, if able to tip the agent, they would usually be able to drive the hard bargain.

After examination for the Government into Bureau operations, Generals Fullerton and Steedman reported, May, 1866: “Negroes regard the Bureau as an indication that people of the North look upon the whites here as their natural enemies, which is calculated to excite suspicion and bad feeling. Only the worthless and idle ask interference, the industrious do not apply. The effect produced by a certain class of agents, is bitterness and antagonism between whites and freedmen, a growing prejudice on the part of planters to the Government and expectations on the part of freedmen that can never be realised. Where there has been no such interference or bad advice given, there is a growing feeling of kindness between races and good order and harmony prevail.” They condemned the “arbitrary, unnecessary and offensive interference by the agents with the relations of the Southern planters and their freedmen.”

General Grant had reported (Dec. 18, 1865) to President Johnson, after a Southern tour: “The belief widely spread among freedmen that the lands of former owners will, at least in part, be divided among them, has come through agents of this Bureau. This belief is seriously interfering with the willingness of the freedmen to make contracts.”

Whether agents originated or simply winked at the red, white and blue stick enterprise, I am unable to say. Into a neighborhood would come strangers from the North, seeking private interviews with negroes possessing a little cash or having access to somebody else’s cash; to these would be shown, with pledges of secrecy, packages of red, white and blue sticks, four to each package. “Get up before light on such a date, plant a stick at the four corners of any piece of land not over a mile square, and the land is yours. Be wary, or the rebels will get ahead of you.”

Packages were five dollars each. One gentleman found a set for which he had lent part of the purchase money planted on his land. If a negro had not the whole sum, the seller would “trust” him for the balance till he “should come into possession of the land.”

Generals Fullerton and Steedman advised discontinuance of the Bureau in Virginia; and some similar recommendation must have accompanied the report for Florida and the Carolinas which contained such revelations as this about the Trent River Settlement, where 4,000 blacks lived in “deplorable condition” under the superintendency of Rev. Mr. Fitz, formerly U. S. A. Chaplain. “Four intelligent Northern ladies,” teaching school in the Settlement, witnessed the harsh treatment of negroes by Mr. Fitz, such as suspension by the thumbs for hours; imprisonment of children for playing on the Sabbath; making negroes pay for huts; taxing them; turning them out on the streets. Interesting statements were given in regard to the “planting officials” who impressed negroes to work lands under such overseers as few Southern masters (outside of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”) would have permitted to drive negroes they owned, the officials reaping profits.

The Bureau had ways of making whites know their place. One could gather a book of stories like this, told me recently by an aged lady, whose name I can give to any one entitled to ask: “Captain B., of the Freedmen’s Bureau, was a very hard man. He took up farms around and put negroes on them. We had a large place; he held that over a year and everything was destroyed. Saturdays, Captain B. would send many negroes out there—and it was pandemonium! My husband was in prison. My father was eighty; he would not complain, but I would. We went to the Bureau repeatedly about the outrages. Captain B. was obsequious, offered father wine; but he did not stop the outrages. Once he asked: ‘Have you not had any remuneration for your place?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘and we are not asking it. We only beg you to make the negroes you send out there behave decently.’ He said he would do anything for us, but did nothing; at last, I went direct to General Stoneman, and he helped us.”

Not long after Generals Grant’s, Fullerton’s, and Steedman’s reports, Congress enlarged the powers of the Bureau. Coincident with this, the negro became a voter, the Bureau a political machine, the agent a candidate. The Bureau had been active in securing negro enfranchisement. It was natural that ambitious agents should send hair-raising stories North of the Southerner’s guile, cruelty and injustice, and touching ones of the negro’s heavenly-mindedness in general and of his fitness to be an elector and law-maker in particular; all proving the propriety and necessity of his possession of the ballot for self-protection and defense.

In signal instances, the Bureau became the negro’s protector in crime, as when its officials demanded at one time of Governor Throckmorton, of Texas, pardon and release of two hundred and twenty-seven negroes from the penitentiary, some of whom had been confined for burglary, arson, rape, murder.

The Bureau did not in the end escape condemnation from those for whom it was created, and who, on acquisition of the ballot, became its “spoiled darlings.” “De ossifers eat up all de niggers’ rations, steal all dey money, w’ar all dey Sunday clo’se,” said Hodges, of Princess Anne, in Virginia’s Black and Tan Convention. The failure of the Freedmen’s Savings Bank was a scandal costing pain and humiliation to all honest Northerners connected with the institution, and many a negro his little hoard and his disposition to accumulate.

It is not fair to overlook benefits conferred by the Bureau because it failed to perform the one great and fine task it might have accomplished, as the freedman’s first monitor, in teaching him that freedom enlarges responsibility and brings no exemption from toil. If much harm, great good was also done in distribution of Government rations, in which whites sometimes received share with blacks. In numbers of places, both races found the agent a sturdy friend and wise counsellor.[17]

No one who knows General O. O. Howard, who was Commissioner, can, I think, doubt the sincerity and purity of purpose which animated him and scores of his subordinates. From the start, the Bureau must have been a difficult organization to handle; once the negro entered into count as a possible or actual political factor, the combined wisdom of Solomon and Moses could not have made its administration a success nor fulfilled the Government’s benign intention in creating it.

PRISONER OF FORTRESS MONROE