The Souls of Black Folk
aforetime quailed at that white master’s command, had bent in love over
the cradles of his sons and daughters, and closed in death the sunken
eyes of his wife,—aye, too, at his behest had laid herself low to his
lust, and borne a tawny man-child to the world, only to see her dark
boy’s limbs scattered to the winds by midnight marauders riding after
“damned Niggers.” These were the saddest sights of that woful day; and
no man clasped the hands of these two passing figures of the
present-past; but, hating, they went to their long home, and, hating,
their children’s children live today.
Here, then, was the field of work for the Freedmen’s Bureau; and since,
with some hesitation, it was continued by the act of 1868 until 1869,
let us look upon four years of its work as a whole. There were, in
1868, nine hundred Bureau officials scattered from Washington to Texas,
ruling, directly and indirectly, many millions of men. The deeds of
these rulers fall mainly under seven heads: the relief of physical
suffering, the overseeing of the beginnings of free labor, the buying
and selling of land, the establishment of schools, the paying of
bounties, the administration of justice, and the financiering of all
these activities.
Up to June, 1869, over half a million patients had been treated by
Bureau physicians and surgeons, and sixty hospitals and asylums had
been in operation. In fifty months twenty-one million free rations were
distributed at a cost of over four million dollars. Next came the
difficult question of labor. First, thirty thousand black men were
transported from the refuges and relief stations back to the farms,
back to the critical trial of a new way of working. Plain instructions
went out from Washington: the laborers must be free to choose their
employers, no fixed rate of wages was prescribed, and there was to be
no peonage or forced labor. So far, so good; but where local agents
differed _toto cælo_ in capacity and character, where the _personnel_
was continually changing, the outcome was necessarily varied. The
largest element of success lay in the fact that the majority of the
freedmen were willing, even eager, to work. So labor contracts were
written,—fifty thousand in a single State,—laborers advised, wages
guaranteed, and employers supplied. In truth, the organization became a
vast labor bureau,—not perfect, indeed, notably defective here and
there, but on the whole successful beyond the dreams of thoughtful men.
The two great obstacles which confronted the officials were the tyrant
and the idler,—the slaveholder who was determined to perpetuate slavery
under another name; and, the freedman who regarded freedom as perpetual
rest,—the Devil and the Deep Sea.
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 marvellous 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 to-day lies
smouldering 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. The regular Bureau court
consisted of one representative of the employer, one of the Negro, and
one of the Bureau. If the Bureau could have maintained a perfectly
judicial attitude, this arrangement would have been ideal, and must in
time have gained confidence; but the nature of its other activities and
the character of its _personnel_ prejudiced the Bureau in favor of the
black litigants, and led without doubt to much injustice and annoyance.
On the other hand, to leave the Negro in the hands of Southern courts
was impossible. In a distracted land where slavery had hardly fallen,
to keep the strong from wanton abuse of the weak, and the weak from
gloating insolently over the half-shorn strength of the strong, was a
thankless, hopeless task. The former masters of the land were
peremptorily ordered about, seized, and imprisoned, and punished over
and again, with scant courtesy from army officers. The former slaves
were intimidated, beaten, raped, and butchered by angry and revengeful
men. Bureau courts tended to become centres simply for punishing
whites, while the regular civil courts tended to become solely
institutions for perpetuating the slavery of blacks. Almost every law
and method ingenuity could devise was employed by the legislatures to
reduce the Negroes to serfdom,—to make them the slaves of the State, if
not of individual owners; while the Bureau officials too often were
found striving to put the “bottom rail on top,” and gave the freedmen a
power and independence which they could not yet use. It is all well
enough for us of another generation to wax wise with advice to those
who bore the burden in the heat of the day. It is full easy now to see
that the man who lost home, fortune, and family at a stroke, and saw
his land ruled by “mules and niggers,” was really benefited by the
passing of slavery. It is not difficult now to say to the young
freedman, cheated and cuffed about who has seen his father’s head
beaten to a jelly and his own mother namelessly assaulted, that the
meek shall inherit the earth. Above all, nothing is more convenient
than to heap on the Freedmen’s Bureau all the evils of that evil day,
and damn it utterly for every mistake and blunder that was made.
All this is easy, but it is neither sensible nor just. Someone had
blundered, but that was long before Oliver Howard was born; there was
criminal aggression and heedless neglect, but without some system of
control there would have been far more than there was. Had that control
been from within, the Negro would have been re-enslaved, to all intents
and purposes. Coming as the control did from without, perfect men and
methods would have bettered all things; and even with imperfect agents
and questionable methods, the work accomplished was not undeserving of
commendation.
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 good-will 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 wrong-doing 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 wilful 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