The Souls of Black Folk
Less than a month after the weary Emancipator passed to his rest, his
successor assigned Major-Gen. 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 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 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
reenslavement. 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 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 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.
The agents that 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 occasional fly that helped spoil the ointment.
Then amid all 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 something 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 shrank
from the master who still strove for their chains; they fled to the
friends that had freed them, even though those friends stood ready to
use them as a club for driving the recalcitrant South back into
loyalty. 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 carpet-bagger, 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
ages,—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 threatened 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