was varied. The
largest element of success lay in the fact that the majority of
the freedmen were willing, often eager, to work. So contracts were
written,--50,000 in a single state,--laborers advised, wages guaranteed,
and employers supplied. In truth, the organization became a vast labor
bureau; not perfect, indeed,--notably defective here and there,--but on
the whole, considering the situation, successful beyond the dreams of
thoughtful men. The two great obstacles which confronted the officers at
every turn were the tyrant and the idler: the slaveholder, who believed
slavery was right, and was determined to perpetuate it under another
name; and the freedman, who regarded freedom as perpetual rest. These
were the Devil and the Deep Sea.

In the work of establishing the Negroes as peasant proprietors the
Bureau was severely handicapped, as I have shown. Nevertheless,
something was done. Abandoned lands were leased so long as they remained
in the hands of the Bureau, and a total revenue of $400,000 derived from
black tenants. Some other lands to which the nation had gained title
were sold, and public lands were opened for the settlement of the few
blacks who had tools and capital. The vision of landowning, however,
the righteous and reasonable ambition for forty acres and a mule
which filled the freedmen's dreams, was doomed in most cases to
disappointment. And those men of marvelous hind-sight, who to-day are
seeking to preach the Negro back to the soil, know well, or ought to
know, that it was here, in 1865, that the finest opportunity of binding
the black peasant to the soil was lost. Yet, with help and striving, the
Negro gained some land, and by 1874, in the one state of Georgia, owned
near 350,000 acres.

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 schoolmistress
through the benevolent agencies, and built them schoolhouses, but it
helped discover and support such apostles of human development as Edmund
Ware, Erastus Cravath, and Samuel Armstrong. State superintendents of
education were appointed, and by 1870 150,000 children were in school.
The opposition to Negro education was bitter in the South, 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