[11] By this formal recognition of the qualifications to the Confession of Faith made in 1647 the scruples of the majority of the Associate Synod of Original Seceders were removed, and 27 ministers, along with a considerable number of their people, joined the Free Church in the following year.
[12] See Taylor Innes, Law of Creeds in Scotland, p. 258 seq.
[13] The language of Dr Buchanan, for example, in 1860 was (mutatis mutandis) the same as that which he had employed in 1838 in moving the Independence resolution already referred to.
FREEDMEN’S BUREAU (officially the Bureau of Freedmen, Refugees and Abandoned Lands), a bureau created in the United States war department by an act of Congress, 3rd of March 1865, to last one year, but continued until 1872 by later acts passed over the president’s veto. Its establishment was due partly to the fear entertained by the North that the Southerners if left to deal with the blacks would attempt to re-establish some form of slavery, partly to the necessity for extending relief to needy negroes and whites in the lately conquered South, and partly to the need of creating some commission or bureau to take charge of lands confiscated in the South. During the Civil War a million negroes fell into the hands of the Federals and had to be cared for. Able-bodied blacks were enlisted in the army, and the women, children and old men were settled in large camps on confiscated Southern property, where they were cared for alternately by the war department and by the treasury department until the organization of the Freedmen’s Bureau. At the head of the bureau was a commissioner, General O. O. Howard, and under him in each Southern state was an assistant commissioner with a corps of local superintendents, agents and inspectors. The officials had the broadest possible authority in all matters that concerned the blacks. The work of the bureau may be classified as follows: (1) distributing rations and medical supplies among the blacks; (2) establishing schools for them and aiding benevolent societies to establish schools and churches; (3) regulating labour and contracts; (4) taking charge of confiscated lands; and (5) administering justice in cases in which blacks were concerned. For several years the ex-slaves were under the almost absolute control of the bureau. Whether this control had a good or bad effect is still disputed, the Southern whites and many Northerners holding that the results of the bureau’s work were distinctly bad, while others hold that much good resulted from its work. There is now no doubt, however, that while most of the higher officials of the bureau were good men, the subordinate agents were generally without character or judgment and that their interference between the races caused permanent discord. Much necessary relief work was done, but demoralization was also caused by it, and later the institution was used by its officials as a means of securing negro votes. In educating the blacks the bureau made some progress, but the instruction imparted by the missionary teachers resulted in giving the ex-slaves notions of liberty and racial equality that led to much trouble, finally resulting in the hostility of the whites to negro education. The secession of the blacks from the white churches was aided and encouraged by the bureau. The whole field of labour and contracts was covered by minute regulations, which, good in theory, were absurd in practice, and which failed altogether, but not until labour had been disorganized for several years. The administration of justice by the bureau agents amounted simply to a ceaseless persecution of the whites who had dealings with the blacks, and bloody conflicts sometimes resulted. The law creating the bureau provided for the division of the confiscated property among the negroes, and though carried out only in parts of South Carolina, Florida and Georgia, it caused the negroes to believe that they were to be cared for at the expense of their former masters. This belief made them subject to swindling schemes perpetrated by certain bureau agents and others who promised to secure lands for them. When negro suffrage was imposed by Congress upon the Southern States, the bureau aided the Union League (q.v.) in organizing the blacks into a political party opposed to the whites. A large majority of the bureau officials secured office through their control of the blacks. The failure of the bureau system and its discontinuance in the midst of reconstruction without harm to the blacks, and the intense hostility of the Southern whites to the institution caused by the irritating conduct of bureau officials, are indications that the institution was not well conceived nor wisely administered.
See P. S. Pierce, The Freedmen’s Bureau (Iowa City, 1904); Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction (Washington, 1866); W. L. Fleming (ed.), Documents relating to Reconstruction (Cleveland, O., 1906); W. L. Fleming, Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama (New York, 1905); and James W. Garner, Reconstruction in Mississippi (New York, 1901).
(W. L. F.)
FREEHOLD, a town and the county-seat of Monmouth county, New Jersey, U.S.A., in the township of Freehold, about 25 m. E. by N. of Trenton. Pop. (1890) 2932; (1900) 2934, of whom 215 were foreign-born and 126 were negroes; (1905) 3064; (1910) 3233. Freehold is served by the Pennsylvania and the Central of New Jersey railways. It is the trade centre of one of the most productive agricultural districts of the state and has various manufactures, including carriages, carpets and rugs, files, shirts, underwear, and canned beans and peas. The town is the seat of two boarding schools for boys: the Freehold Military School and the New Jersey Military Academy (chartered, 1900; founded in 1844 as the Freehold Institute). One of the residences in the town dates from 1755. A settlement was made in the township about 1650, and the township was incorporated in 1693. In 1715 the town was founded and was made the county-seat; it was long commonly known (from the county) as Monmouth Court-House, but afterwards took (from the township) the name Freehold, and in 1869 it was incorporated as the Town of Freehold. An important battle of the War of Independence, known as the battle of Monmouth, was fought near the court-house on the 28th of June 1778. A short distance N.W. of the court-house is a park in which there is a monument, unveiled on the 13th of November 1884 in commemoration of the battle; the base is of Quincy granite and the shaft is of Concord granite. Surmounting the shaft is a statue representing “Liberty Triumphant” (the height to the top of which is about 100 ft.). The monument is adorned with five bronze reliefs, designed and modelled by James E. Kelly (b. 1855); one of these reliefs represents “Molly Pitcher” (d. 1832), a national heroine, who, when her husband (John C. Hays), an artillerist, was rendered insensible during the battle, served the gun in his place and prevented its capture by the British.[1] Joel Parker (1816-1888), governor of New Jersey in 1863-1866 and 1872-1875, was long a resident of Freehold, and the erection of the monument was largely due to his efforts. A bronze tablet on a boulder in front of the present court-house, commemorating the old court-house, used as a hospital in the battle of Monmouth, was unveiled in 1907. Freehold was the birthplace and home of Dr Thomas Henderson (1743-1824), a Whig or Patriot leader in New Jersey, an officer in the War of Independence, and a member of the Continental Congress in 1779-1780 and of the national House of Representatives in 1795-1797.
The name Freehold was first used of a Presbyterian church established about 1692 by Scottish exiles who came to East Jersey in 1682-1685 and built what was called the “Old Scots’ Church” near the present railway station of Wickatunk in Marlboro’ township, Monmouth county. In this church, in December 1706, John Boyd (d. 1709) was ordained—the first recorded Presbyterian ordination in America. The church was the first regularly constituted Presbyterian church. No trace of the building now remains in the burying-ground where Boyd was interred, and where the Presbyterian Synod of New Jersey in 1900 raised a granite monument to his memory; his tombstone is preserved by the Presbyterian Historical Society in Philadelphia. John Tennent (1706-1732) became pastor of the Freehold church in 1730, when a new church was built by the Old Scots congregation on White Hill in the present township of Manalapan (then a part of Freehold township), near the railway station and village called Tennent; his brother William (1705-1777), whose trance, in which he thought he saw the glories of heaven, was a matter of much discussion in his time, was pastor in 1733-1777. In 1751-1753 the present “Old Tennent Church,” then called the Freehold Church, was erected on (or near) the same site as the building of 1730; in it Whitefield preached and in the older building David Brainerd and his Indian converts met. In 1859 this church (whose corporate name is “The First Presbyterian Church of the County of Monmouth”) adopted the name of Tennent, partly to distinguish it from the Presbyterian church organized at Monmouth Court-House (now Freehold) in 1838.