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[202] colored woman, who had been a slave, came to an official in the War Department and said she had been a long time in want of a bureau, and that she understood that there was one there waiting for her.

By a few well chosen lines the cartoonist Nast, before his audiences, frequently represented on a blackboard a sizable bureau with the drawers open and little curly-headed colored children jumping out from them. The serious people of the country, however, were rejoiced that the representations of their delegates in their Indiana Convention had at last resulted, through the President and Congress, in providing a benevolent system for those just freed from slavery, and for those, white and colored, who had been driven hither and thither by the operations of the Civil War. The first provision, however, was for only one year after peace. It committed all subjects relating to the classes named to the care of the new Bureau, and it put the responsibility for the operations of the Bureau upon the President himself. The use of abandoned lands, authorized by the Act, was intended to give some revenue to the Government, thus hoping, if possible, to avoid direct appropriations of money. The part that was to interest me most was the provision that the head or commissioner and his assistants might be detailed from the army and assigned to duty without increase of pay or allowances. In fact, the President could take any or all of the officials required from the military service.

There was another use besides the purpose of revenue for the abandoned lands, the commissioner being required to set apart for the use of loyal dependents such abandoned farms as he should find in the insurrectionary States, or farms of which the United

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