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To oversee the making and enforcement of wage contracts for freedmen. To appear in the courts as the freedmen's best friend. To furnish the freedmen with a minimum of land and of capital. To establish schools. To furnish such institutions of relief as hospitals, outdoor relief stations, etc.
This extract has considerable importance as being the occasion of an unfortunate personal difficulty between Mr. Rousseau and Mr. Grinnell, of Iowa, narrated in a subsequent chapter. The latter portion of Mr. Rousseau's speech was devoted to the subject of reconstruction. He was followed by Mr. Shanklin, of Kentucky. He characterized the Freedmen's Bureau as a "gigantic monster."
The fall of the Freedmen's Bureau hindered the transmutation of this system into a modern wage system, and allowed the laborers to be cheated by high interest charges on the subsistence advanced and actual cheating often in book accounts.
It is to be expected, however, that the Freedmen's Bureau will be able to remedy evils of that kind.
Merely a concrete test of the underlying principles of the great republic is the Negro Problem, and the spiritual striving of the freedmen's sons is the travail of souls whose burden is almost beyond the measure of their strength, but who bear it in the name of an historic race, in the name of this the land of their fathers' fathers, and in the name of human opportunity.
But the defeat of the President's policies in the elections of 1866, the increasing radicalism of Congress as shown by the Civil Rights Act, the expansion of the Freedmen's Bureau, the report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, and the proposal of the Fourteenth Amendment led farsighted Southerners to see that the President was likely to lose in his fight with Congress.
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.
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.
In some places the agents even collected delinquent Confederate taxes. Much of the confiscable property was not sold but was turned over to the Freedmen's Bureau* for its support. The total amount seized cannot be satisfactorily ascertained. The Ku Klux minority report asserted that 3,000,000 bales of cotton were taken, of which the United States received only 114,000.
At Chicago appeals were made to the Soldiers' Aid Society and Christian Commission for aid in the freedmen's department, and also to myself personally, on account of the great distress in Kansas after General Price's raid through Missouri, followed by Colonels Lane and Jennison, who drove thousands of poor whites and freedmen into that young State. I decided to hasten thither, with Mrs.
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