“It will never do to have Treasury agents who lease the lands to white men, and War Department agents who assign the same lands to colored people. Nothing but confusion and conflict of authority can result. It will not work at all. But even if it would, why employ two sets of agents to do what one set can do much better? And who is to inspect the leased plantations, and see to it that neither employers nor employed are wronged? The men who gave the leases? But they are Treasury agents, and have nothing to do with freedmen. Or the Freedmen’s Commissioners? But what authority can they have over men who do not hold their leases from them? The men who have the care of the laborer ought to have the leasing of the land and the inspection of the leases; and they should be authorized to lease equally to white and to colored people.”
Such a statement is an argument.
This conclusion has the support also of General Banks, in a letter addressed to one of the Freedmen’s Commission. Here are his words:—
“The assignment of the abandoned or forfeited plantations to one department of the Government, and the protection and support of the emancipated people to another, is a fundamental error productive of incalculable evils, and cannot be too soon or too thoroughly corrected.”
The able and elaborate report from the Freedmen’s Commission, just published, considers this question carefully. Nothing could be more explicit than the following testimony.
“But, in the judgment of the Commission, the most serious error in connection with the present arrangements for the care and protection of these people arises out of the assignment to a different agency of the care and disposal of the abandoned plantations. To enter into the detail of all the evils and abuses that have arisen out of this error, and which are unavoidable so long as it continues to exist, would occupy too great a space in this report. Suffice it to say, that it is the source of the greatest confusion and a perpetual collision between the different local authorities, in which not only the emancipated population, but the Government itself, suffers the most serious injuries and losses.
…
“And this is the purport of all the testimony which the Commission has been able to obtain, not in the department of the Gulf only, but everywhere, in relation to this matter.
“The unhesitating judgment of every person, official or other, not interested in the opportunities it affords for peculation, with whom we have consulted, coincides with that of General Banks. All, without exception, declare that no system can avail to effect the great objects contemplated that does not assign to one and the same authority the care and disposal of the abandoned plantations and the care and protection of the emancipated laborers who are to cultivate them.
“And, after the most thorough investigations, I am authorized in saying that this is the deliberate judgment of the Commission.”[351]