abandoned
lands, and the control of all subjects relating to refugees and
freedmen." Of special importance was the provision in the creating act
that gave the freedmen to understand that each male refugee was to be
given forty acres with the guarantee of possession for three years.
Throughout the existence of the Bureau its chief commissioner was
General O.O. Howard. While the principal officers were undoubtedly men
of noble purpose, many of the minor officials were just as undoubtedly
corrupt and self-seeking. In the winter of 1865-6 one-third of its aid
was given to the white people of the South. For Negro pupils the Bureau
established altogether 4,239 schools, and these had 9,307 teachers and
247,333 students. Its real achievement has been thus ably summed up:
"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.... For some fifteen million dollars,
beside the sum spent before 1865, and the dole of benevolent societies,
this bureau set going a system of free labor, established a beginning of
peasant proprietorship, secured the recognition of black freedmen before
courts of law, and founded the free common school in the South. On the
other hand, it failed to begin the establishment of good will between
ex-masters and freedmen, to guard its work wholly from paternalistic
methods, which discouraged self-reliance, and to carry out to any
considerable extent its implied promises to furnish the freedmen with
land."[1] To this tale of its shortcomings must be added also the
management of the Freedmen's Bank, which "was morally and practically
part of the Freedmen's Bureau, although it had no legal connection with
it." This institution made a really remarkable start in the development
of thrift among the Negroes, and its failure, involving the loss of the
first savings of hundreds of ex-slaves, was as disastrous in its moral
as in its immediate financial consequences.

[Footnote 1: DuBois: _The Souls of Black Folk_, 32-37.]

When the Freedmen's Bureau came to an end, it turned its educational
interests and some money over to the religious and benevolent societies
which had cooeperated with it, especially to the American Missionary
Association. This society had been organized before the Civil War on
an interdenominational and strong anti-slavery basis; but with the
withdrawal of general interest the body