Despite, therefore, the great popularity and influence of General Grant, Congress was inclined to place more credence in the report of
The attitude of
Congress toward
the reports.
The first measure it attempted was one to enlarge the powers of the Freedmen's Bureau. This supplementary project originated with the
The Freedmen's
Bureau bill of 1866.
First, While the law of March 3d, 1865, provided for the appointment of a commissioner and ten assistants as the entire personnel of the Bureau, the new bill authorized the appointment of a commissioner, twelve assistant commissioners, and the appointment or detail of an agent for each county or parish throughout the section where the Bureau might operate.
Second, While in the law of March 3d, 1865, the Bureau rather appeared to be under the civil administration of the President, the new bill placed it distinctly under the military administration of the President, and authorized the President to extend "military jurisdiction and protection over all of the officers, agents, and employees of the Bureau."
Third, While the law of March 3d, 1865, confined the powers of the Bureau to the giving of aid to refugees and freedmen and the distribution of abandoned and confiscated lands among them, the new bill proposed, in addition to this, to vest in the Bureau the power to build school houses and asylums for the freedmen, and the most wide-reaching jurisdiction over all civil and criminal cases where equality in civil rights and status, and in the application of penalties, was denied, or the denial thereof attempted, on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude; and it authorized military protection in all such cases to be extended to the suffering party. In a single sentence, this bill provided a sort of palatine jurisdiction over the freedmen in the section lately the scene of rebellion.
It was a stiff measure even for the transition period from war to peace. It cannot be justified constitutionally as anything but a war measure. It is true that the Thirteenth Amendment, just adopted, could be interpreted as giving Congress the power to prohibit inequalities in civil rights and in criminal punishments, as the incidents of slavery or involuntary servitude, and to extend the ordinary jurisdiction of the constitutional courts of the United States over all cases where the attempt to apply such inequalities should be made. But it certainly did not give Congress the power, under any ordinary circumstances, to create a new system of courts, subject to the Executive, officered by military men, and armed directly with military power to enforce decisions. It was, as has been said, a war measure, and nothing else. The question was reduced simply to this: Ought the Congress of the United States to enact a new war measure, after armed resistance had ceased everywhere, except perhaps in some parts of Texas? Was it sound policy, was it good morals, to do so, when the people in the sections lately in rebellion were settling down into the pursuits of peace, even
The passage
of the bill.