teachers, and the benevolence of the North may not be able to support so many as will be needed. The colored people ought to aid. . . . If they prefer it at any place, they might agree to be taxed according to their incomes, and take measures, in consultation with the officers of the bureau, to collect the tax themselves, and pay it over to the officers, who will use it for the schools and give account to all concerned.

House Executive Documents No. 70, 39th Congress, Ist Session, p. 154.

B

Even while the Federal Government was administering their affairs through direct agencies from Washington, they were oppressed and plundered by the Freedmen's Bureau agencies, by the cotton thieves, and the military, to an extent only exceeded by the carpet-bag local governments which superseded them.1

First, as to the Freedmen's Bureau and its operations. By this act, four millions of negroes became the pupils, wards, servitors, and pliant tools of a political and extremely partisan agency, inimical and deadly hostile to the peace, order, and best interests of southern society.

The agents of the Freedmen's Bureau were, as we have shown before, generally of a class of fanatics without character or responsibility, and were selected as fit instruments to execute the partisan and unconstitutional behests of a most unscrupulous head. Thus, the negroes were organized into secret political societies known as Loyal Leagues, in which organizations they were taught that their former owners were their worst enemies, and that to act with them, politically or religiously, would certainly result in their re-enslavement. A regulation of this Bureau required all agreements for service between whites

1 These charges against the Bureau were made by the minority of a congressional committee.

and blacks to be signed and witnessed in the presence of, and left in the custody of, the agent. It was a common practice, after a planter or farmer had contracted in the required form with the freedmen for the year, had his crops planted and in process of cultivation, that his negro laborers would strike for higher wages. Nothing but the intervention of the Bureau agent could induce them to return, and that inducement could only be effected by the planter or farmer paying to the agent from ten to twenty dollars per head. This sum was simply a perquisite of the agent, and when paid, the negro always returned to his labors, though not receiving a cent of additional compensation. . . . These Bureau agents had authority to order the arrest and imprisonment of any citizen on the single statement of any vicious negro; and if any resistance was made to the mandates of the Bureau agent, the post commandant, or military governor, was always ready to enforce it with a file of bayonets.

...

Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States, Vol. I, pp. 441-2, 42d Congress, 2d Session, Senate Report 41, Part I.

QUESTIONS

What part was the Bureau designed to take in securing the freedmen, against attempts to re-enslave them? How could it protect freedmen against unjust State laws? How did it seek to impress on the negroes the necessity of their working like freemen, and seeking themselves to advance their race? What, according to the charges of the minority report, was the part of Bureau officials in organizing Loyal Leagues? How did its officials extort money from planters?

L

SOUTHERN GOVERNMENT UNDER RECONSTRUCTION

A

ELECTION TO THE ALABAMA CONVENTION OF 1868

Their election was the most ridiculous farce ever beheld. I wish you could have seen the poor ignorant blacks giving in their "bits of paper," as they called their printed ballots, when they knew no more of the names on them, who they were, what they were, than you did at the same time in your far-off home. In all the elections ever held in the United States, there has not been so much fraud committed as there was in this one (1867). The negroes think they have been greatly wronged because they have not been paid for voting..

Every office, from governor to constable, from the chief justice of the Supreme Court to the magistrate of a county beat, is made elective and placed at the disposal of the blacks, not one in five hundred of whom can either read or write, and who know no more of what they are doing, when they vote, than would a hog or mule know, if those brutes had the privilege of voting.

Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States, "Alabama Testimony," Vol. III, p. 1832. Letter of Samuel A. Hale. Senate Reports, 42d Congress, 2d Session, 1871-1872.

B

PAINTED PEGS

I can tell you from what I know and have seen myself and also from what negroes have told me, that they have been promised lands and mules - forty acres of land and

a mule - on divers occasions. Many an old negro has come to me and asked me about that thing. I can illustrate it by one little thing that I saw on a visit once to Gainesville, Sumter County [Alabama]. At a barbecue there I saw a man who was making a speech to the negroes, telling them what good he had done for them; that he had been to Washington City and had procured from one of the Departments here certain pegs. I saw the pegs. He had about two dozen on his arm; they were painted red and blue. He said that those pegs he had obtained from here at a great expense to himself; that they had been made by the government for the purpose of staking out the negroes' forty acres. He told the negroes that all he wanted was to have the expenses paid to him, which was about a dollar a peg. He told them that they could stick one peg down at a corner, then walk so far one way and stick another down, till they had got the four pegs down; and that, when the four pegs were down, the negroes' forty acres would be included in that area; and all he had to say to them was, that they could stick those pegs anywhere they pleased— on anybody's land they wanted to, but not to interfere with each other; and he would advise them, in selecting the forty acres, to take half woodland and half clear; that nobody would dare to interfere with those pegs.

Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States, "Alabama Testimony," p. 314. Statement of John G. Pierce. Senate Reports, 42d Congress, 2d Session, 1871-1872.

C

A NEGRO LEGISLATURE

A description of the South Carolina Legislature in days when the old white leaders were disfranchised by the Reconstruction acts, and the negro vote was manipulated by corrupt politicians. The account of this travesty on a legislative body needs no comment. James S. Pike (1811-1882) was a newspaper man who before the war had been a pronounced anti-slavery partisan.

Such a picture, as this here given, accounts in part for continuing opposition among southern whites against negro participation in politics. It should in all fairness be said, however, that even the negro and carpet-bag governments did some good things, such as establishing the public school system.

Here

We will enter the House of Representatives. sit one hundred and twenty-four members. Of these, twenty-three are white men, representing the remains of the old civilization. These are good-looking, substantial citizens. . . . There they sit, grim and silent. They feel themselves to be but loose stones, thrown in to partially obstruct a current they are powerless to resist. . .

This dense negro crowd . . . do the debating, the squabbling, the law-making, and create all the clamor and disorder of the body. .

The Speaker is black, the clerk is black, the door-keepers are black, the little pages are black, the chairman of the Ways and Means is black, and the chaplain is coal black. At some of the desks sit colored men whose types it would be hard to find outside of Congo; whose costume, visages, attitudes, and expression, only befit the forecastle of a buccaneer. It must be remembered, also, that these men, with not more than a half dozen exceptions, have been themselves, slaves, and that their ancestors were slaves for generations.

. . No one is allowed to talk five minutes without interruption, and the one interruption is a signal for another and another, until the original speaker is smothered under an avalanche of them. Forty questions of privilege will be raised in a day. At times, nothing goes on but alternating questions of order and of privilege. The inefficient colored friend who sits in the Speaker's chair cannot suppress this extraordinary element of the debate. Some of the blackest members exhibit a pertinacity of intrusion in raising these points of order and questions of privilege that few white men can equal. Their struggles to get the floor, their bellowings, and physical contortions, baffle descrip