Mr. Lincoln said: "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. Our case is new. We must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save the country." (Joel Parker Lecture at Harvard College.)
These words indicate that the powers of the Constitution were inadequate to the conduct of the war, and henceforth the war must be conducted as occasion deemed expedient. In other words, the executive power must be declared greater than the power that made it, or the creature greater than the Creator, and with dictatorial methods the war was conducted. Avaunt, Constitution, avaunt! We are fighting for the Union, for dominion over the Southern territory again, and so the Constitution was folded up, etc.
CHAPTER XX.
Freedmen's Bureau—Gen. O. O. Howard, Commissioner—Platform for Reconstruction—Ironclad Oath—Natural Rights of Man—Civil Rights—Negroes Made Citizens—Persecution—Agents of Freedmen's Bureau—Personal Experience—Negro Justices—Some Trials—Judge Shackelford—Secret Societies—William A. Sharkey—Gov. Adelbert Ames—Sheriff Webber—Taxes—Board of Levee Commissioners Dismissed—Religious Negroes—Bishop Wilmer—Prayers for the President—Shotgun Election—Hegira—Carpetbaggers—Indissoluble Union—Indestructible States—We Were a Conquered Nation—Reconstruction Only a Definition for Deeds Done—Strength of Respective Armies.
When I commenced writing the narrative of my observations in early life and the incidents of service in the United States army and my diary of the civil war, I did it to preserve for my children the record of these events, but in volume it has increased more than at first intended; and as it may perhaps some day be made public, I feel it incumbent on me to give my experience under the workings of reconstruction as being of more value than a description by any historian of a later age who would have no enlightenment by living under its arbitrary rule.
An act creating the Freedmen's Bureau was passed March 3, 1865. The commissioner was authorized to set apart for the use of loyal refugees and freedmen abandoned lands, also confiscated lands, and assign forty acres for three years, etc., to families.
In 1866 a supplementary bill was passed over a veto to extend the act. "Among other things the bill subjected any white person, who might be charged with depriving a freedman of civil rights or immunities to imprisonment or fine or both, without defining the meaning of civil rights or immunities." The jurisdiction of the agents extended to all contracts, and without a written contract and the agent's approval no freedman could be employed. No indictment by a grand jury nor a trial by a jury was necessary. The ipse dixit of an ignorant negro was cause for fine or imprisonment without appeal.
Gen. O. O. Howard, noted for exuberant piety, was made Commissioner, and his career, his establishing of the Howard University in Washington for the higher culture of the negro, the cottages he built for them, the aid he gave the Church, the land he bought, and the Freedman's Bank he established, which blew up or burst, can be found in a report of a congressional committee. Under this bill the annual expenditure was $11,750,000.
An article published in the Atlantic Monthly for August, 1865, sounded the keynote for the action of the United States government in legislation for the "rebels," wherein it is stated: "We are placed by events in that strange condition in which the safety of the republican form of government we desire to insure the Southern States has more safeguards in the INSTINCTS OF THE IGNORANT than in the INTELLIGENCE OF THE EDUCATED." And furthermore it is declared that "the highest requirements of abstract justice coincide with the LOWEST REQUIREMENTS of political prudence, and the LARGEST JUSTICE to the loyal blacks is the real condition of the WIDEST CLEMENCY to the rebel whites."
This declaration proclaims that the Southern States would be safer if their governments were established on the ignorance of the blacks than on the intelligence of the whites. Could malignity go any farther? On this degrading plane were the State governments established.