The prevalent delusion in regard to an impending division of the lands among the blacks had its origin in the operation of the war-time confiscation laws, in some of the Bureau legislation, and in General Sherman's Sea Island order, but it was further fostered by the agents until most blacks firmly believed that each head of a family was to get "40 acres and a mule." This belief seriously interfered with industry and resulted also in widespread swindling by rascals who for years made a practice of selling fraudulent deeds to land with red, white, and blue sticks to mark off the bounds of a chosen spot on the former master's plantation.The assistant commissioners labored hard to disabuse the minds of the Negroes, but their efforts were often neutralized by the unscrupulous attitude of the agents.
As the contest over reconstruction developed in Washington, the officials of the Bureau soon recognized the political possibilities of their institution.
After midyear of 1866, the Bureau became a political machine for the purpose of organizing the blacks into the Union League, where the rank and file were taught that reenslavement would follow Democratic victories.Nearly all of the Bureau agents aided in the administration of the reconstruction acts in 1867and in the organization of the new state and local governments and became officials under the new regime.They were the chief agents in capturing the solid Negro vote for the Republican party.
Neither of the two plans for guiding the freedmen into a place in the social order--the "Black Laws" and the Freedmen's Bureau--was successful.The former contained a program which was better suited to actual conditions and which might have succeeded if it had been given a fair trial.These laws were a measure of the extent to which the average white would then go in "accepting the situation" so far as the blacks were concerned.And on the whole the recognition of Negro rights made in these laws, and made at a time when the whites believed that they were free to handle the situation, was remarkably fair.The Negroes lately released from slavery were admitted to the enjoyment of the same rights as the whites as to legal protection of life, liberty, and property, as to education and as to the family relation, limited only by the clear recognition of the principles of political inferiority and social separation.Unhappily this legislation was not put to the test of practical experience because of the Freedmen's Bureau; it was nevertheless skillfully used to arouse the dominant Northern party to a course of action which made impossible any further effort to treat the race problem with due consideration to actual local conditions.
Much of the work of the Freedmen's Bureau was of only temporary benefit to both races.The results of its more permanent work were not generally good.
The institution was based upon the assumption that the Negro race must be protected from the white race.In its organization and administration it was an impossible combination of the practical and the theoretical, of opportunism and humanitarianism, of common sense and idealism.It failed to exert a permanently wholesome influence because its lesser agents were not held to strict accountability by their superiors.Under these agents the alienation of the two races began, and the ill feelings then aroused were destined to persist into a long and troubled future.
