accomplished a great work before it was repudiated. Carl Schurz in 1864 felt warranted in saying, “Not half of the labor that has been done in
the South this year, or will be done there next
year, would have been or would be done but for
the exertions of the Freedmen’s Bureau. . . . No
other agency, except one placed there by the national government, could have wielded the moral
power whose interposition was so necessary to prevent the Southern society from falling at once into
the chaos of a general collision between its different elements.”[1]
The nation knew, however, that the Freedmen’s Bureau was temporary. What should follow it? The attitude of the South was not reassuring. Carl Schurz reported that: “Some planters held back their former slaves on their plantations by brute force. Armed bands of white men patrolled the country roads to drive back the Negroes wandering about. Dead bodies of murdered Negroes were found on and near the highways and by-paths. Gruesome reports came from the hospitals—reports of colored men and women whose ears had been cut off, whose skulls had been broken by blows, whose bodies had been slashed by knives or lacerated by scourges. A
- ↑ Report of Carl Schurz to President Johnson, in Senate Exec. Doc. No. 2, 39th Cong., 1st Sess.
