se. But to me neither soldier nor fugitive
speaks with so deep a meaning as that dark and human cloud that clung
like remorse on the rear of those swift columns, swelling at times to
half their size, almost engulfing and choking them. In vain were they
ordered back, in vain were bridges hewn from beneath their feet; on
they trudged and writhed and surged, until they rolled into Savannah,
a starved and naked horde of tens of thousands. There too came the
characteristic military remedy: "The islands from Charleston south, the
abandoned ricefields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the
sea, and the country bordering the St. John's River, Florida, are
reserved and set apart for the settlement of Negroes now made free by
act of war." So read the celebrated field order.

All these experiments, orders, and systems were bound to attract and
perplex the government and the nation. Directly after the Emancipation
Proclamation, Representative Eliot had introduced a bill creating a
Bureau of Emancipation, but it was never reported. The following June,
a committee of inquiry, appointed by the Secretary of War, reported
in favor of a temporary bureau for the "improvement, protection,
and employment of refugee freedmen," on much the same lines as were
afterward followed. Petitions came in to President Lincoln from
distinguished citizens and organizations, strongly urging a
comprehensive and unified plan of dealing with the freedmen, under a
bureau which should be "charged with the study of plans and execution of
measures for easily guiding, and in every way judiciously and humanely
aiding, the passage of our emancipated and yet to be emancipated blacks
from the old condition of forced labor to their new state of voluntary
industry."

Some half-hearted steps were early taken by the government to put both
freedmen and abandoned estates under the supervision of the Treasury
officials. Laws of 1863 and 1864 directed them to take charge of and
lease abandoned lands for periods not exceeding twelve months, and to
"provide in such leases or otherwise for the employment and general
welfare" of the freedmen. Most of the army officers looked upon this
as a welcome relief from perplexing "Negro affairs;" but the Treasury
hesitated and blundered, and although it leased large quantities of land
and employed many Negroes, especially along the Mississippi, yet it
left the virtual control of the laborers and their relations to their
neighbo