CHAPTER XVIII
The Freedmen’s Bureau
Federal authorities had a terrific problem to deal with in four millions of slaves suddenly let loose. Military commanders found themselves between the devil and the deep sea.
Varied instructions were given to bring order out of chaos. “Freedmen that will use any disrespectful language to their former masters will be severely punished,” is part of a ukase issued by Captain Nunan, at Milledgeville, in fervent if distracted effort for the general weal. By action if not by order, some others settled the matter this way: “Former masters that will use any disrespectful language to their former slaves will be severely punished”; as witness the case where a venerable lady, bearing in her own and that of her husband two of the proudest names in her State, was marched through the streets to answer before a military tribunal the charge of having used offensive language to her cook.
With hordes of negroes pilfering and pillaging, new rulers had an elephant on their hands. No vagrant laws enacted by Southern Legislatures in 1865-6 surpassed in severity many of the early military mandates with penalties for infraction. The strongest argument in palliation of the reconstruction acts is found in these laws which were construed into an attempt to re-enslave the negro. The South had no vagrant class before the war and was provided with no laws to meet conditions of vagrancy which followed emancipation with overwhelming force.
Comparing these laws with New England’s, we find that in many respects the former were modelled on the latter, from which the words “ball and chain,” “master and mistress” and the apprentice system, which Mr. Blaine declared so heinous, might well have been borrowed, though New England never faced so grave a vagrancy problem as that which confronted the South.
Negroes flocked to cities, thick as blackbirds. Federal commanders issued orders: “Keep negroes from the cities.” “The Government is feeding too many idlers.” “Make them stay on the plantations.” “Impress upon them the necessity of making a crop, or famine is imminent throughout the South.” “Do not let the young and able-bodied desert their children, sick, and aged.” As well call to order the wild things of the woods! In various places something like the old “patter-roller” system of slavery was adopted by the Federals, wandering negroes being required to show passes from employers, saying why they were abroad.
General Schofield’s Code for the Government of Freedmen in North Carolina (May, 1865) says: “Former masters are constituted guardians of minors in the absence of parents or other near relatives capable of supporting them.” The Radicals made great capital out of a similar provision in Southern vagrancy laws.
Accounts of confusion worse confounded wrung this from the “New York Times” (May 17, 1865): “The horse-stealing, lemonade and cake-vending phase of freedom is destined to brief existence. The negro misunderstands the motives which made the most laborious, hard-working people on the face of the globe clamour for his emancipation. You are free, Sambo, but you must work. Be virtuous, too, O Dinah! ‘Whew! Gor Almighty! bress my soul!’”
The “Chicago Times” (July 7, 1865) gives a Western view: “There is chance in this country for philanthropy, a good opening for abolitionists. It is to relieve twenty-eight millions of whites held in cruel bondage by four million blacks, a bondage which retards our growth, distracts our thoughts, absorbs our efforts, drives us to war, ruptures our government, disturbs our tranquillity, and threatens direfully our future. There never was such a race of slaves as we; there never was another people ground so completely in the dust as this nation. Our negro masters crack their whips over our legislators and our religion.”