Generals Fullerton and Steedman advised discontinuance of the Bureau in Virginia; and some similar recommendation must have accompanied the report for Florida and the Carolinas which contained such revelations as this about the Trent River Settlement, where 4,000 blacks lived in “deplorable condition” under the superintendency of Rev. Mr. Fitz, formerly U. S. A. Chaplain. “Four intelligent Northern ladies,” teaching school in the Settlement, witnessed the harsh treatment of negroes by Mr. Fitz, such as suspension by the thumbs for hours; imprisonment of children for playing on the Sabbath; making negroes pay for huts; taxing them; turning them out on the streets. Interesting statements were given in regard to the “planting officials” who impressed negroes to work lands under such overseers as few Southern masters (outside of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”) would have permitted to drive negroes they owned, the officials reaping profits.
The Bureau had ways of making whites know their place. One could gather a book of stories like this, told me recently by an aged lady, whose name I can give to any one entitled to ask: “Captain B., of the Freedmen’s Bureau, was a very hard man. He took up farms around and put negroes on them. We had a large place; he held that over a year and everything was destroyed. Saturdays, Captain B. would send many negroes out there—and it was pandemonium! My husband was in prison. My father was eighty; he would not complain, but I would. We went to the Bureau repeatedly about the outrages. Captain B. was obsequious, offered father wine; but he did not stop the outrages. Once he asked: ‘Have you not had any remuneration for your place?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘and we are not asking it. We only beg you to make the negroes you send out there behave decently.’ He said he would do anything for us, but did nothing; at last, I went direct to General Stoneman, and he helped us.”
Not long after Generals Grant’s, Fullerton’s, and Steedman’s reports, Congress enlarged the powers of the Bureau. Coincident with this, the negro became a voter, the Bureau a political machine, the agent a candidate. The Bureau had been active in securing negro enfranchisement. It was natural that ambitious agents should send hair-raising stories North of the Southerner’s guile, cruelty and injustice, and touching ones of the negro’s heavenly-mindedness in general and of his fitness to be an elector and law-maker in particular; all proving the propriety and necessity of his possession of the ballot for self-protection and defense.
In signal instances, the Bureau became the negro’s protector in crime, as when its officials demanded at one time of Governor Throckmorton, of Texas, pardon and release of two hundred and twenty-seven negroes from the penitentiary, some of whom had been confined for burglary, arson, rape, murder.
The Bureau did not in the end escape condemnation from those for whom it was created, and who, on acquisition of the ballot, became its “spoiled darlings.” “De ossifers eat up all de niggers’ rations, steal all dey money, w’ar all dey Sunday clo’se,” said Hodges, of Princess Anne, in Virginia’s Black and Tan Convention. The failure of the Freedmen’s Savings Bank was a scandal costing pain and humiliation to all honest Northerners connected with the institution, and many a negro his little hoard and his disposition to accumulate.
It is not fair to overlook benefits conferred by the Bureau because it failed to perform the one great and fine task it might have accomplished, as the freedman’s first monitor, in teaching him that freedom enlarges responsibility and brings no exemption from toil. If much harm, great good was also done in distribution of Government rations, in which whites sometimes received share with blacks. In numbers of places, both races found the agent a sturdy friend and wise counsellor.[17]
No one who knows General O. O. Howard, who was Commissioner, can, I think, doubt the sincerity and purity of purpose which animated him and scores of his subordinates. From the start, the Bureau must have been a difficult organization to handle; once the negro entered into count as a possible or actual political factor, the combined wisdom of Solomon and Moses could not have made its administration a success nor fulfilled the Government’s benign intention in creating it.
PRISONER OF FORTRESS MONROE