Iv.
But the curse of Slavery was still on them—somebody must take them by the hand; for, however generous had been the aid given by private societies organized at the East and West, their efforts, of necessity, were wholly inadequate to the work.
Without government supervision, distress would become all but universal, and thousands be left to perish.
Mr. Sumner showed that the service required was too vast and complex for unorganized individuals.
Nothing but the government could supply the adequate machinery, and extend the proper net-work of assistance, with the proper unity of operation.
The national government must interfere in the case precisely as in building the Pacific Railroad.
It was therefore a matter of imperative necessity that a Bridge from Slavery to Freedom should be constructed; and call it charity, or duty, it was as sacred as humanity.
The bill he had proposed, would protect the Freedman from any system of serfdom, or enforced apprenticeship
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—an idea which many of the former slave-masters clung to as a reliance for the still unremunerated labor of those from whom it had once been exacted.
To the Treasury Department had already been confided jurisdiction over ‘houses, tenements, lands and plantations, deserted and abandoned by insurgents within the lines of military occupation.’
The Bill provided against any system of enforced labor or apprenticeship.
It was constructed just as carefully as to what it should
not attempt to do; —the trouble being in all such cases in trying to accomplish too much.
‘It does not,’ as he remarked, ‘assume to provide ways and means of support for the Freedmen; but it does look to securing them the opportunity of labor, according to well-guarded contracts, and under the friendly advice of the agents of the
Government, who will take care that they are protected from abuse of all kinds.’
The Commission on Freedmen, appointed by the
Secretary of War, in their report had already said: ‘For a time we need a Freedmen's Bureau; not because these people are negroes only,—because they are men who have been for generations despoiled of their rights.
This Commission has already recommended the establishment of such a Bureau.’
It was a long, hard fight.
It encountered at every step, whenever it came up, bitter opposition.
It finally passed the Senate, on the 28th of June; but it had a still harder struggle to go through in the
House, where it did not pass until the 9th of February of the following year, and then only by a majority of two.
It had the ordeal of another struggle in the Senate, when it at last passed that body without a division, and on the same day, March 3d, was approved by the
President, and the
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Freedmen's Bureau was established.
For whatever abuses may afterwards have crept into the administration of the system it was no more to blame, than was the system of contracts for munitions of war, or any other department—for the war to save the
Union was disgraced from beginning to end by robbery and plunder.
But the historic pen which traces the first steps of millions of Freedmen to civilization, will have to record the fact that this Bureau was, what
Mr. Sumner had first declared it to be, the
Bridge to Freedom.
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