unfortunate as that of garrisoning the South with negro troops. This was the establishment of that (incubus, that Hydraheaded monster, the Freedmen's Bureau. When the North had given freedom to four million stolen slaves, it was hoped that this generous offering which she had laid on the Altar of Liberty would have terminated forever that baleful agitation of the negro question, which has deluged the land with blood and has ruined the fairest portion of this continent. The South acquiesced in the decree - though she was so blind as not to see the justice of it - which by one despotic stroke of the pen stripped her of . . her property and she . . endeavored to adapt herself to the new relations between the two races, which this decree had brought about. . . Humanity and interest, which so seldom point in the same direction, in this case impelled the South to do all in its power to fit the negro for his new conditions. The strong but paternal hand which had controlled him through centuries of slavery, having been suddenly and rudely withdrawn, the only hope of rendering him either useful, industrious or harmless, was to elevate him in the scale of civilization, and to make him appreciate not only the blessings, but the duties of freedom. This was the prevalent. . sentiment of the South and that much more has not been done to carry this sentiment into effect is due solely to the pernicious and mischievous interference of that most vicious institution, the Freedmen's Bureau. The war which was so prolific of monstrosities, new theories of republican government, new versions of the Constitution, new and improved constructions of the Divine precepts of Holy Writ, gave birth to nothing which equals in deformity and depravity this "Monstrum horrendum informe ingens." The whole machinery of this bureau has been used by the basest men, for the purpose of swindling the negro, plundering the white man and defrauding the Government. There may be an honest man connected with the Bureau, but I fear that the commissioners sent by your Excellency to probe the rottenness of this cancer will find their search for such as fruitless as was that of the Cynic of old. The report of these Commissioners furnishes ample justification for the ill

will, the distrust, and the contempt with which the people of the South regard this baleful and pernicious institution.

Influence in Labor and Politics

Ku Klux Report, Alabama Testimony (1871), pp. 357, 371. State-
ment of A. D. Sayre, formerly a Whig.
[1865-1870]

WHEN the agents first came there . . they established a Freed-
man's Bureau. They notified everybody that they must em-
ploy their freedmen, and that all their contracts must be sub-
mitted to the inspection of the Freedmen's Bureau; that no man
would be allowed to employ freedmen unless their contracts
were submitted to and approved by that Bureau. . . They
listened to every sort of tale that any dissatisfied negro might
choose to tell; they would send out and arrest white men, bring
them in under guard, try them, and put them in jail. They got
hold of plantations there, what they call refuges for freedmen.
It was announced that if the freedmen got dissatisfied they
could enter there, and be fed and clothed, and taken care of.
In that way a large number of negroes were enticed away from)
plantations where they had been living, and they flocked to
these places. Hundreds of them died from neglect. The im-
pression was produced upon the negro that the white man who
had been his master was his enemy, and that these men were
his peculiar friends; that they had nothing to expect
through their old masters. They then commenced the estab-
lishment of these Loyal Leagues, into which they got almost
every negro in the country. They would send their agents

from plantation to plantation, until I expect there was hardly a negro in the whole country who did not belong to the League. In that way a want of confidence was produced between the negro and the white man, and a feeling of confidence between the negro and the agents of this Bureau. It has been a very troublesome thing to counteract that. . . They would tell all sorts of tales before elections; they would send regular orders to the League members on the plantations to go and vote. I have been told that order extended to negroes from fifteen years and upwards. Negroes themselves have told me

that they voted the republican ticket for the reason that they were informed by those men that, if they did not do it, they would be put back into slavery, and their wives made to work on the road. It had such an effect that a gentleman in Montgomery told me that some of his own former slaves came back to him after the election [1870] and said, "Well, massa, what house must I go into? I understand that the democrats have succeeded, and that we are slaves again."

[If the Bureau had not been established] as many of the whites would have acted with the Republican party as with the Democratic party. . . It had a tendency to drive them off [the whites] from the Republican party. . . The Freedmen's Bureau was supposed to be one of the means of that party for the purpose of creating distrust between the negroes and the white people.

The Bureau as a Political Machine

Ku Klux Report, Georgia Testimony, p. 272. Testimony of General Wright of Augusta, ex-Confederate. [1865-1870]

[THE negroes] were taken possession of by a class of men who went down there connected in some way with the Freedmen's Bureau; they swarmed all over the country. The white people were sore, intensely sore . . and they shrank back and had nothing to say to the negroes. That course of conduct on their part enabled these men to go on and obtain the confidence of the negroes; they made the negroes believe that unless they banded themselves together and stood up for their rights, the white people would put them back into slavery. . . These men came there and fastened themselves upon every community, and when the election for members of the legislature came on they were themselves elected. I can give you an instance right there, within a stone's throw of where I live, of a man by the name of Captain Richardson, who went down there in the Bureau. He lived in Augusta, and was elected a member of the legislature from the county of Hancock, way up in the interior of the State; he perhaps never was in that country in his life. There was a man by the name of J. Mason Rice, who

came out in the Bureau, and lived in Augusta; he was elected a representative of the county of Columbia. A man of the name of Sherman came down there, not in the Bureau, but as a developer. He bought a piece of land near Augusta, and worked it for a while, and then had to give it up. He ran for the place of senator in the district composed of Wilkes, Jackson, and Columbia. Wilkes is the county in which Toombs lives. This man ran for senator, and was elected there. There was Rice, elected as a member from Columbia County, and never was in it; Richardson was elected as a member from Hancock County, and he never was in that county; and Sherman was elected as senator from Wilkes, Lincoln, and Columbia Counties, and . . he has never been in either one of them. A man by the name of Claiborn, a Baltimore negro, came down to Augusta with the Bureau, and was elected a member of the legislature from Burke County. He served until a few months before the close of the legislature, when he was killed by a negro in the capital. Up to the latter part of 1868 the negroes believed that by voting they were going to get a division of the land and stock of the country. These carpet-baggers would go down there and actually sell stakes to them. That is almost too improbable for belief; but these rascals would go down there and sell painted stakes to these negroes, and tell them that all they had to do was to put down the stakes on their owner's farms, and forty acres of land would be theirs after election. You could see them all over the country. negroes said they gave a dollar apiece for those stakes. They were very ignorant, or they would not have believed such things; but they did believe it.

The

Political Activities of Bureau Officials

House Report no. 121, 41 Cong., 2 Sess., pp. 47, 53. minority report, Howard investigation, 1870.

Extract from [1865-1869]

Ir was ascertained that the testimony offered would implicate others as high in position as General Howard himself, going to show that the Bureau had been made an active engine for the election of governors, legislators, members of Congress and

United States senators in the Southern States, the public money and property being freely used for these purposes. The majority of the committee would not allow any such field of investigation to be entered, and promptly refused to allow the witnesses ready to prove these facts to be subpoened or examined.

Sufficient evidence, however, did get in, to show that to such purposes the bureau was put. The general way in which the political operations were carried on was through the instrumentality of the officers and willing agents of the bureau, the freedmen's schools and teachers, the missionaries sent out by the American Missionary Society, and the Freedmen's Savings Bank. The funds of the bureau were used by each of these. . Under the pretext of looking after the education and welfare of the freedmen, political organizations were effected, and the negroes instructed as to their political strength and power, by organizing them together in secret organizations. The poor freedman, deceived by pretended friendship . . fell into the purposes of these men, and submitted himself to the uses to which they put him. General Howard not only knew of this, but was the head of the movement. He proved this upon himself after the majority refused to hear further proof in support of the charges, by putting in as evidence the official report of Colonel John T. Sprague, assistant commissioner for Florida. This report was made to General Howard, and is dated October 1, 1867. Under the head of "politics and public meetings," he gives Howard an account of his political operations, and boasts having "registered 15,441 negro voters, against 11,151 registered whites," and states that he had "taken measures for their quiet instruction, through the medium of sub-assistants, in their rights and duties under the reconstruction acts." . .

The Freedmen's Bureau has been made a mighty engine of power, by which to control an entire section of the Union, and bring it under partisan subserviency. To accomplish this, the public treasury has been freely used in various ways. Emissaries have been dispatched to the South with the Bible in one