This text is part of:
Table of Contents:
Chapter
47
: freedmen's aid societies and an act of congress creating a Bureau of refugees, freedmen and abandoned lands
Chapter
55
:
first
appropriation by congress for the bureau; the reconstruction Act,
March
2
,
1867
; increase of educational work
Chapter
60
: opposition to Bureau and reconstruction work became personal; the
Congregational Church of
Washington
Chapter
62
: life in
Washington, D. C.
,
1866
to
1874
; assigned to duty in regular army as commander,
Department of the Columbia
Chapter
63
: in the
Northwest
, among the
Indians
; trip to
Alaska
; life in
Portland, Ore.
;
1874
to
1881
Chapter
64
: superintendent of the
United States military Academy
; commanding
Department of the Platte
,
Omaha, Neb.
Chapter
68
:
French
army maneuvers,
1884
; promotion to
Major General
,
United States army
,
San Francisco
1886
-
88
[244] of the land owners, my instructions had been clearly defined, namely, to return estates to those only who could show constant loyalty, past as well as presenta loyalty which could be established by the production of an oath of allegiance, or amnesty, or other evidence. As the Bureau held property by authority of an Act of Congress for certain definite purposes, I had presumed and believed that this tenure would continue until those purposes were accomplished; that such property must be surrendered by us only when it was made evident that our possession and control of it was not proper. But the positive adverse action of President Johnson and the non-action of Congress caused a complete reversal of the Government's generous provision for the late slaves. Thus early officers and agents were constrained to undertake to make bricks without straw. After years of thinking and observation I am inclined to believe that the restoration of their lands to the planters proved for all their future better for the negroes.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.