ern land was awakening as from
some wild dream to poverty and social revolution. In a time of perfect
calm, amid willing neighbors and streaming wealth, the social uplifting
of 4,000,000 slaves to an assured and self-sustaining place in the body
politic and economic would have been an herculean task; but when to the
inherent difficulties of so delicate and nice a social operation were
added the spite and hate of conflict, the Hell of War; when suspicion
and cruelty were rife, and gaunt Hunger wept beside Bereavement,--in
such a case, the work of any instrument of social regeneration was in
large part foredoomed to failure. The very name of the Bureau stood for
a thing in the South which for two centuries and better men had refused
even to argue,--that life amid free Negroes was simply unthinkable, the
maddest of experiments. The agents which the Bureau could command varied
all the way from unselfish philanthropists to narrow-minded busybodies
and thieves; and even though it be true that the average was far better
than the worst, it was the one fly that helped to spoil the ointment.
Then, amid all this crouched the freed slave, bewildered between friend
and foe. He had emerged from slavery: not the worst slavery in the
world, not a slavery that made all life unbearable,--rather, a
slavery that had here and there much of kindliness, fidelity, and
happiness,--but withal slavery, which, so far as human aspiration and
desert were concerned, classed the black man and the ox together. And
the Negro knew full well that, whatever their deeper convictions may
have been, Southern men had fought with desperate energy to perpetuate
this slavery, under which the black masses, with half-articulate
thought, had writhed and shivered. They welcomed freedom with a cry.
They fled to the friends that had freed them. They shrank from the
master who still strove for their chains. So the cleft between the white
and black South grew. Idle to say it never should have been; it was as
inevitable as its results were pitiable. Curiously incongruous elements
were left arrayed against each other: the North, the government, the
carpetbagger, and the slave, here; and there, all the South that was
white, whether gentleman or vagabond, honest man or rascal, lawless
murderer or martyr to duty.

Thus it is doubly difficult to write of this period calmly, so intense
was the feeling, so mighty the human passions, that swayed and blinded
men. Amid it all two f