bout to be
formally promulgated by the Executive Department of the Government,
as incorporated in the Constitution, had made every negro a free man.
The Southern States had responded to this Act of National authority by
enacting a series of laws which really introduced, as has already been
shown, a new, offensive and most oppressive form of servitude. Thus
not only was rank injustice contemplated by the States lately in
rebellion, but they conveyed also an insulting challenge to the
authority of the Nation. It was as if they had said to the National
Government: "In order to destroy the Confederacy and restore the Union
you have manumitted these black men; but we will demonstrate to you, by
our local legislation, that you are powerless to give them any further
freedom than we are willing to concede, and we defy you to show by
what means you can achieve it!"

The first answer of the National Government to this defiance was Mr.
Trumbull's bill conferring upon the Freedmen's Bureau a degree of
power which combated and restrained the Southern authorities at every
point where wrong was committed or menaced. It was designed for the
purpose of extending to the freeman protection against all the wrongs
of local legislation, and to make him feel that the Government which
had freed him would not desert him and allow his release from slavery
to be made null and void. Mr. Johnson's policy of declaring all the
States at once restored to the Union and in full possession of their
powers of local legislation, would carry with it necessarily the
confirmation of the odious laws already enacted in those States, and
also the power to make them as stringent and binding upon the freedmen
as the discretion of Southern legislators might dictate. The war would
thus have practically injured the negro, for after taking from him that
form of protection which slavery afforded, it would have left him an
object of still harsher oppression than slavery itself--an oppression
that would be inspired and quickened by a spirit of vengeance.

The bill was debated at full length, nearly every prominent man in the
Senate taking part. Mr. Hendricks of Indiana and Mr. Garrett Davis of
Kentucky opposed it in speeches of excessive bitterness, and Mr.
Guthrie of Kentucky with equal earnestness but less passion. It was
sustained with great ability by all the leading Republican senators;
and on the final passage, in an unusually full Senate, the vote in its