In pursuance of these Acts of Congress, and of this order of the War Department, the Secretary of the Treasury has proceeded to appoint special agents and to establish a code of regulations. I have in my hands a small volume, entitled “Commercial Intercourse with and in States declared in Insurrection, and the Collection of Abandoned and Captured Property,”[350] containing the statutes and also the departmental regulations on the subject. It appears that there is already an organization under the Secretary of the Treasury, and also a system, each of reasonable completeness, to carry out these purposes.
In determining where the Bureau of Freedmen should be placed, it becomes important to consider the interests it is proposed to guard; and this brings me to another aspect of the question.
Looking at the freedmen whose welfare is in question, we find that their labor may be classified under two different heads: first, military; and, secondly, predial, or relating to farms. There are still other laborers, including especially mechanics; but these are chiefly in the towns. The large mass are included in the two classes I have named. It is, therefore, these two classes that are to be particularly considered.
1. The first class is already provided for. It appears that one hundred thousand freedmen are already engaged in the military service as soldiers or laborers. Others will continue to be engaged in this way. These are all naturally and logically under the charge of the War Department; nor do they need the superintendence of the proposed bureau. The Act of Congress equalizing their condition in the army of the United States is better for them than any bureau.
2. But there will remain the other larger class, consisting in the main of women and children and farm laborers, who must find employment on the abandoned lands. To this labor they are accustomed. These lands are their natural home. But this class must naturally and logically come under the charge of the department which has charge of the abandoned lands. Conceding that all in the military service fall under the superintendence of the War Department, it follows with equal reason that all who labor on the lands must fall under the superintendence of the Treasury Department, so long, at least, as this department has charge of the lands.
This conclusion seems so reasonable that your Committee were not able to resist it. But the testimony of persons who have given particular attention to the question is also explicit; so that experience is in harmony with reason. I have in my hands a letter from Colonel McKaye, an eminent citizen of New York, and also a member of the Commission to inquire and report on this subject, appointed by the Secretary of War. After visiting South Carolina and Louisiana, expressly to study the necessities of freedmen, and to ascertain what could be done to benefit them, he thus expresses himself:—
“In the first place, everybody who has had any practical experience of the working of the plantations or of the superintendence of negro labor will tell you that the control of the abandoned plantations and the care of the colored people must be in the same hands.”
You will not fail to observe how positively this expert speaks. According to him, all who have had “practical experience” insist that the care of the freedmen and of the plantations should be “in the same hands”; and so important does he regard this point that he places it first in consideration.
But Colonel McKaye is not alone. Here is a letter from Hon. Robert Dale Owen, Chairman of the Commission on Freedmen, appointed by the Secretary of War, which testifies as follows:—