In his difficult and laborious position, General Howard has had to act without the help of any public funds, by using temporarily certain species of abandoned property, and by means of details of officers and men from the army, who have done their work in the Bureau as part of their military duty, and without other than their usual pay. The good accomplished has been rather by the use of influence, by forbearance, by the exercise of the minimum of absolute authority. But in spite of the good intentions of Congress, the help of the Government of the United States, which, so far as its action upon the Freedmen's Bureau is concerned, is exclusively the executive, has not in any complete sense been given either to the freedmen themselves, in their toilsome upward road, nor to those who have been striving to aid them in the ascent; but it has rather been felt as a cold, sullen and grudging sufferance, verging even into a pretty distinct manifestation of an enmity like that of the worse class of unfriendly southern whites, and showing more than one token of an intention to destroy the Bureau and leave the freedmen helpless as soon as possible.
General Howard has done all that could be done, against these obstacles. It is easy to see what constant exercise he must need, of the Christian virtues of forbearance, patience, kindness, and the overcoming of evil with good, as well as of the moral qualities of honor and justice, and the soldierly attainments of order, promptitude and industry. With some of these he must meet the angry tricks of white enemies; with some, the pitiful faults—which are misfortunes rather—faults of the freedmen themselves—idleness, falsehood, dishonesty, disorder, incapacity, fickleness; with others still, the inactive resistance of his superiors, and the cumbrous machinery of an organization which the nature of the case prevents from coming into good working shape.
In spite of all obstacles, the Missionary General and his Bureau and the Commission have done much. Up to the first day of 1867, fourteen hundred schools had been established, with sixteen hundred and fifty-eight teachers and over ninety thousand pupils; besides 782 Sabbath Schools with over 70,000 pupils; and the freedmen were then paying towards the support of these schools, out of their own scanty earnings, after the rate of more than eleven thousand dollars a month. Within one year, they had accumulated in their savings bank, $616,802.54. Many of them have bought and possess homesteads of their own. Their universal obedience to law would be remarkable in any community in the world, and under such treatment as they have experienced from their former masters since the war, would have been simply impossible for the body of freemen in the most law-abiding of the Northern States. And above all, they are with one accord most zealous, most diligent and most successful, in laboring to obtain the religious and intellectual culture which alone can fit them for their new position, as self-governing citizens of a free country.
The views of intelligent army officers, of the task which General Howard undertook in accepting this post and of his fitness for it, are not without interest. Col. Bowman thus describes the work:
"He was placed at the head of a species of Poor Law Board, with vague powers to define justice and execute loving kindness between four millions of emancipated slaves and all the rest of mankind. He was to be not exactly a military commander, nor yet a judge of a Court of Chancery; but a sort of combination of the religious missionary and school commissioner, with power to feed and instruct, and this for an empire half as large as Europe. But few officers of the army would have had the moral courage to accept such an appointment, and fewer still were as well fitted to fill it and discharge one-half its complicated and multifarious duties."
When General Howard, on accepting his new post, advised his old commander by letter, General Sherman, in a friendly reply, thus wrote:
"I hardly know whether to congratulate you or not, but of one thing you may rest assured, that you possess my entire confidence, and I cannot imagine that matters that may involve the future of four millions of souls could be put in more charitable and more conscientious hands. So far as man can do, I believe you will, but I fear you have Hercules' task. God has limited the power of man, and though, in the kindness of your heart, you would alleviate all the ills of humanity, it is not in your power; nor is it in your power to fulfill one-tenth part of the expectations of those who framed the bureau for the freedmen, refugees and abandoned estates. It is simply impracticable. Yet you can and will do all the good one man may, and that is all you are called on as a man and a Christian to do; and to that extent count on me as a friend and fellow-soldier for counsel and assistance." General Sherman more than once repeated to others similar testimonies of his faith in General Howard.
General Howard has not the vast intellect and brilliant genius of General Sherman, nor the massive strength and immense tenacious will of General Grant. But he has qualities which are even loftier; namely, those which are the sure basis for such respect and confidence as General Sherman's; which alone have enabled him to accomplish what he has in an enterprise wholly discouraging on any merely human principles. Grant and Sherman, in what they have done, had at their backs a people far more intelligent, resolute and wealthy, than those against whom they warred; but a man like Howard, whose soul opens upward and takes in the unselfish strength and love and faith of Almighty God, can do great things for humanity irrespective of money and majorities.