freedmen's-bureau

Updated: May 19, 2025

The veto of the Freedmen's-Bureau Bill, on the 19th of February, was followed by a large popular meeting in Washington, on the 22d, to approve the President's action. The meeting adjourned to the White House to congratulate the President, and he in turn made a long speech in which he broke through all restraint, and spoke his mind with exasperating frankness.

James Gillespie Blaine - Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 : From Lincoln to Garfield, with a Review of the Events Which Led to the Political Revolution of 1860

In the outraged and resentful minds of those who had sustained the Union cause through its trials, the real offenses of the President were clearly seen, and bitterly denounced: his hostility to the Fourteenth Amendment; his unwillingness to make citizenship National; his opposition to all efforts to secure the safety of the public debt, and the sacredness of the soldier's pension; his resistance to measures that would put the rebel debt beyond the possibility of being a burden upon the whole nation or even upon the people of the Southern States; his determination that freedmen should not be placed within the protection of Organic law; his eagerness to turn the Southern States over to the control of the rebel element, without condition and without restraint; his fixed hostility to every form of reconstruction that looked to national safety and the prevention of another rebellion; his opposition to every scheme that tended to equalize representation in Congress, North and South, and his persistent demand that the negro should be denied suffrage, yet be counted in the basis of apportionment; his treacherous and malignant conduct in connection with the atrocious massacre at New Orleans; his hostility to the growth of free States in the North-West, while he was constantly urging the instant re-admission of all the rebel States; his denial of a morsel of food to the suffering and starving negro and white Unionist of the South in their dire extremity, as shown by his veto of the Freedmen's-bureau Bill; his cruel attempt to exclude the colored man from the power to protect himself by law, in his shameless veto of the Civil Rights Bill; and last, and worst of all, his heartless abandonment of that Union-loving class of white men in the South who became the victims of rebel hatred, from which he had himself escaped only by the strength of the National arms.

James Gillespie Blaine - Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 : From Lincoln to Garfield, with a Review of the Events Which Led to the Political Revolution of 1860