ment,
the military commander was in a few instances also appointed assistant
commissioner. Each assistant commissioner was aided by a headquarters
staff and had under his jurisdiction in each state various district,
county, and local agents, with a special corps of school officials,
who were usually teachers and missionaries belonging to religious and
charitable societies. The local agents were recruited from the
members of the Veteran Reserve Corps, the subordinate officers and
non-commissioned officers of the army, mustered-out soldiers, officers
of Negro troops, preachers, teachers, and Northern civilians who had
come South. As a class these agents were not competent persons to guide
the blacks in the ways of liberty or to arbitrate differences between
the races. There were many exceptions, but the Southern view as
expressed by General Wade Hampton had only too much foundation: "There
MAY be," he said, "an honest man connected with the Bureau." John Minor
Botts, a Virginian who had remained loyal to the Union, asserted that
many of the agents were good men who did good work but that trouble
resulted from the ignorance and fanaticism of others. The minority
members of the Ku Klux Committee condemned the agents as being
"generally of a class of fanatics without character or responsibility."

The chief activities of the Bureau included the following five
branches: relief work for both races; the regulation of Negro labor; the
administration of justice in cases concerning Negroes; the management of
abandoned and confiscated property; and the support of schools for the
Negroes.

The relief work which was carried on for more than four years consisted
of caring for sick Negroes who were within reach of the hospitals,
furnishing food and sometimes clothing and shelter to destitute blacks
and whites, and transporting refugees of both races back to their homes.
Nearly a hundred hospitals and clinics were established, and half a
million patients were treated. This work was greatly needed, especially
for the old and the infirm, and it was well done. The transportation
of refugees did not reach large proportions, and after 1866 it was
entangled in politics. But the issue of supplies in huge quantities
brought much needed relief though at the same time a certain amount of
demoralization. The Bureau claimed little credit, and is usually
given none, for keeping alive during the fall and winter of 1865-1866
thousands of destitute w