or ought to
know, that the opportunity of binding the Negro peasant willingly to
the soil was lost on that day when the Commissioner of the Freedmen's
Bureau had to go to South Carolina and tell the weeping freedmen, after
their years of toil, that their land was not theirs, that there was a
mistake--somewhere. If by 1874 the Georgia Negro alone owned three
hundred and fifty thousand acres of land, it was by grace of his thrift
rather than by bounty of the government.

The greatest success of the Freedmen's Bureau lay in the planting of
the free school among Negroes, and the idea of free elementary
education among all classes in the South. It not only called the
school-mistresses through the benevolent agencies and built them
schoolhouses, but it helped discover and support such apostles of human
culture as Edmund Ware, Samuel Armstrong, and Erastus Cravath. The
opposition to Negro education in the South was at first bitter, and
showed itself in ashes, insult, and blood; for the South believed an
educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro. And the South was not wholly
wrong; for education among all kinds of men always has had, and always
will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and
discontent. Nevertheless, men strive to know. Perhaps some inkling of
this paradox, even in the unquiet days of the Bureau, helped the
bayonets allay an opposition to human training which still to-day lies
smouldering in the South, but not flaming. Fisk, Atlanta, Howard, and
Hampton were founded in these days, and six million dollars were
expended for educational work, seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars
of which the freedmen themselves gave of their poverty.

Such contributions, together with the buying of land and various other
enterprises, showed that the ex-slave was handling some free capital
already. The chief initial source of this was labor in the army, and
his pay and bounty as a soldier. Payments to Negro soldiers were at
first complicated by the ignorance of the recipients, and the fact that
the quotas of colored regiments from Northern States were largely
filled by recruits from the South, unknown to their fellow soldiers.
Consequently, payments were accompanied by such frauds that Congress,
by joint resolution in 1867, put the whole matter in the hands of the
Freedmen's Bureau. In two years six million dollars was thus
distributed to five thousand claimants, and in the end the sum exceeded