and they also believe that the President means that they shall have them; and hence the "fair terms" which they propose are such as will neither satisfy the freedmen nor the friends of the freedmen. The negroes, on the other hand, almost universally believe that the islands have been given to them, and they are not likely to readily relinquish that belief. . . An attempt to force them from the islands at present, or to compel them to the acceptance of the terms proposed by the planters, will overthrow their faith in the Government, and there will be - bloodshed.

Land Certificates in Florida

John Wallace, Carpet Bag Rule in Florida, 1885, p. 39. [1865-1867]

DURING the years of 1865-67 there was much speculation among the freedmen as to what the government intended to do for them in regard to farms. . . One Stonelake, United States Land Register at Tallahassee, appointed soon after the surrender, taking advantage of the ignorance of the freedmen, issued to them thousands of land certificates purporting to convey thousands of acres of land. For each certificate the freedman was required to pay not less than five dollars, and as much more as Stonelake could extort from the more ignorant. He induced the most influential to make the first purchases, and, it was generally believed, gave them a portion of his fees to secure purchasers. The former masters warned our people against this fraud, but as Stonelake was one of the representatives of the paternal government, he was supposed by the freedmen to be incapable of fraud or deception. Many of them were led to believe that these lands consisted of their former masters' plantations, and that the certificates alone would oust the latter from possession. After showing the certificates around among his neighbors and exulting over the purchase of a plantation, he would eventually show it to his former master, who would explain the fraud, when he would rush back to Stonelake for his money, who would invent some new deception to quiet him, and explain that upon further examination of his books he found the lands were located further south. These explanations did not fully satisfy the freedmen, and

they called a meeting and appointed several of their number to go down south and spy out the Promised Land. This committee expended the money raised by their confiding friends, and after an absence of several weeks in a pretended survey, reported that they saw some good lands. . and advised the freedmen to occupy them, but as they were unable to locate the Promised Land, their advice was not followed, and the victims were left to vent their curses upon the swindler Stonelake.

Painted Pegs from Washington

Ku Klux Report, Alabama Testimony, p. 319. Statement of John G. Pierce. For years the negroes were swindled by sharpers who traded upon their belief in the future divisions of lands. [1865-1870]

I CAN tell you from what I know and have seen myself, and also from what negroes have told me, that they have been promised lands and mules - forty acres of land and a mule on divers occasions. Many an old negro has come to me and asked me about that thing. I can illustrate it by one little thing that I saw on a visit once to Gainesville, Sumter County. At a barbecue there I saw a man who was making a speech to the negroes, telling them what good he had done for them; that he had been to Washington City and had procured from one of the Departments here certain pegs. I saw the pegs. He had about two dozen on his arm; they were painted red and blue. He said that those pegs he had obtained from here at a great expense to himself; that they had been made by the Government for the purpose of staking out the negroes' forty acres. He told the negroes that all he wanted was to have the expenses paid to him, which was about a dollar a peg. He told them that they could stick one peg down at a corner, then walk so far one way and stick another down, then walk so far another way and stick another down, till they had got the four pegs down; and that, when the four pegs were down, the negroes' forty acres would be included in that area; and all he had to say to them was, that they could stick those pegs anywhere they pleased -on anybody's land they wanted to, but not to interfere with each other; and he would advise them, in selecting

the forty acres, to take half woodland and half clear; that nobody would dare to interfere with those pegs.

Sales of Striped Pegs

T. H. Ball, Clarke County (Alabama), p. 627. Such frauds were perpetrated as late as 1900.

.

[1873]

IN 1873 there passed through the county a white man, supposed to be from the North, with a large bundle of little colored stakes, who called upon the freed-men and told them that the President had authorized him to distribute among them those stakes in order that they might become owners of land, and that wherever they stuck one of those stakes the land should be theirs, no matter who had owned or claimed it. They could make their own selections for their farms. The price of a stake was three dollars, but when the freed-men could not raise that amount the stake-man would sell even for one dollar. And many of the credulous and trusting colored people. . bought these little stakes, stuck them on the lands of their white neighbors, and some began to work their newly acquired plantations, with what results need not be told.

4.

ESTIMATES AND OPINIONS OF THE

BUREAU'S WORK

Carl Schurz Defends the Bureau

Senate Ex. Doc. no. 2, 39 Cong., 1 Sess., p. 40. From Schurz's report to the President. [1865]

THAT abuses were connected with the management of freedmen's affairs; that some of the officers of the bureau were men of more enthusiasm than discretion, and in many cases went beyond their authority; all this is certainly true. But while the southern people are always ready to expatiate upon the shortcomings of the Freedmen's Bureau, they are not so ready to recognize the services it has rendered. I feel warranted in saying that not one-half of the labor that has been done in the south this year, or will be done there next year, would have been or would be done but for the exertions of the Freedmen's Bureau. The confusion and disorder of the transition period would have been infinitely greater had not an agency interfered which possessed the confidence of the emancipated slaves; which could disabuse them of any extravagant notions and expectations and be trusted; which could administer to them good advice and be voluntarily obeyed. No other agency, except one placed there by the national government, could have wielded that moral power whose interposition was so necessary to prevent the southern society from falling at once into the chaos of a general collision between its different elements. That the success achieved by the Freedmen's Bureau is as yet very incomplete cannot be disputed. A more perfect organization and a more carefully selected personnel may be desirable; but it is doubtful whether a more suitable machinery can be devised to secure to free labor in the South that protection against disturbing influences which the nature of the situation still imperatively demands.

Dissatisfaction about Wage Regulation

Senate Ex. Doc. no. 27, 39 Cong., 1 Sess., p. 98. correspondence in the National Intelligencer.

Augusta, Georgia, [January, 1866]

SOME dissatisfaction in the article of wages exists with a late

circular issued, just prior to Christmas, from the headquarters of the Freedmen's Bureau in this State. This circular, while not expressly commanding any schedule of wages, suggests a tariff in such matters as, to the minds of the freed people, will doubtless be taken as equivalent to an order to that effect. These suggestions mention from $180 to $156 per annum for males, and from $96 to $120 for females. . food and lodging, in all cases, super-added. Now, it is claimed that these rates are fully one hundred per cent. too great.

The Necessity for the Bureau

Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, part iv, p. 82. Statement of Chaplain T. W. Conway. Conway had had trouble while in charge of the Bureau in Louisiana and had been removed. He made speeches over the North on conditions in the South. [1866] I SHOULD expect in Louisiana, as in the whole southern country, that the withdrawal of the Freedmen's Bureau would be followed by a condition of anarchy and bloodshed. . . I am pained at the conviction that I have in my own mind that if the Freedmen's Bureau is withdrawn the result will be fearful in the extreme. What it has already done and is now doing in shielding these people, only incites the bitterness of their foes. They will be murdered by wholesale, and they in their turn will defend themselves. It will not be persecution merely; it will be slaughter; and I doubt whether the world has ever known the like. These southern rebels, when the power is once in their hands, will stop at nothing short of extermination. Governor Wells himself told me that he expected in ten years to see the whole colored race exterminated, and that conviction is shared very largely among the white people of the south. It has been threatened by leading men there that they would exterminate the freedmen. . . In reply I said that they could not drive the freedmen out of the nation, because, in the first place, they would not go; and for another reason, that they had no authority to drive them out; and for a third reason, that they were wanted in the south as laborers. To that they replied, that, if necessary, they would get their laborers from Europe; that white laborers would be more agreeable to them;