igures ever stand to typify that day to coming
men: the one a gray-haired gentleman, whose fathers had quit themselves
like men, whose sons lay in nameless graves, who bowed to the evil of
slavery because its abolition boded untold ill to all; who stood at
last, in the evening of life, a blighted, ruined form, with hate in his
eyes. And the other, a form hovering dark and mother-like, her awful
face black with the mists of centuries, had aforetime bent in love over
her white master's cradle, rocked his sons and daughters to sleep, and
closed in death the sunken eyes of his wife to the world; ay, too, had
laid herself low to his lust and borne a tawny man child to the world,
only to see her dark boy's limbs scattered to the winds by midnight
marauders riding after Damned Niggers. These were the saddest sights
of that woeful day; and no man clasped the hands of these two passing
figures of the present-past; but hating they went to their long home,
and hating their children's children live to-day.

Here, then, was the field of work for the Freedmen's Bureau; and since,
with some hesitation, it was continued by the act of 1868 till 1869, let
us look upon four years of its work as a whole. There were, in 1868, 900
Bureau officials scattered from Washington to Texas, ruling, directly
and indirectly, many millions of men. And the deeds of these rulers
fall mainly under seven heads,--the relief of physical suffering, the
overseeing of the beginnings of free labor, the buying and selling
of land, the establishment of schools, the paying of bounties, the
administration of justice, and the financiering of all these activities.
Up to June, 1869, over half a million patients had been treated by
Bureau physicians and surgeons, and sixty hospitals and asylums had
been in operation. In fifty months of work 21,000,000 free rations were
distributed at a cost of over $4,000,000,--beginning at the rate of
30,000 rations a day in 1865, and discontinuing in 1869. Next came the
difficult question of labor. First, 30,000 black men were transported
from the refuges and relief stations back to the farms, back to the
critical trial of a new way of working. Plain, simple instructions went
out from Washington,--the freedom of laborers to choose employers, no
fixed rates of wages, no peonage or forced labor. So far so good; but
where local agents differed toto coelo in capacity and character, where
the personnel was continually changing, the outcome