confiscation laws, in some of the Bureau legislation, and in General
Sherman's Sea Island order, but it was further fostered by the agents
until most blacks firmly believed that each head of a family was to get
"40 acres and a mule." This belief seriously interfered with industry
and resulted also in widespread swindling by rascals who for years made
a practice of selling fraudulent deeds to land with red, white, and blue
sticks to mark off the bounds of a chosen spot on the former master's
plantation. The assistant commissioners labored hard to disabuse the
minds of the Negroes, but their efforts were often neutralized by the
unscrupulous attitude of the agents.

As the contest over reconstruction developed in Washington, the
officials of the Bureau soon recognized the political possibilities of
their institution. After midyear of 1866, the Bureau became a political
machine for the purpose of organizing the blacks into the Union League,
where the rank and file were taught that reenslavement would follow
Democratic victories. Nearly all of the Bureau agents aided in
the administration of the reconstruction acts in 1867 and in the
organization of the new state and local governments and became officials
under the new regime. They were the chief agents in capturing the solid
Negro vote for the Republican party.

Neither of the two plans for guiding the freedmen into a place in
the social order--the "Black Laws" and the Freedmen's Bureau--was
successful. The former contained a program which was better suited to
actual conditions and which might have succeeded if it had been given a
fair trial. These laws were a measure of the extent to which the average
white would then go in "accepting the situation" so far as the blacks
were concerned. And on the whole the recognition of Negro rights made in
these laws, and made at a time when the whites believed that they were
free to handle the situation, was remarkably fair. The Negroes lately
released from slavery were admitted to the enjoyment of the same rights
as the whites as to legal protection of life, liberty, and property, as
to education and as to the family relation, limited only by the clear
recognition of the principles of political inferiority and social
separation. Unhappily this legislation was not put to the test
of practical experience because of the Freedmen's Bureau; it was
nevertheless skillfully used to arouse the dominant Northern party to a
course of action w