previous next

[281]

January 5, 1866, he introduced in the Senate a new Freedmen's Bureau bill. On the 12th of the same month it was brought up for discussion, when he explained what he wished to accomplish with it: (1) An essential extension beyond the one year to be terminated by a future Act of Congress. (2) That it should apply to the whole country wherever were the beneficiaries; (3) That the President should give them land by reserving not exceeding 3,000,000 acres from settlement or sale in certain Southern States where public lands still remained; (4) That General Sherman's possessory titles on the sea islands be made real; and (5), more important still, that when discriminations against negroes were made Bureau officers and agents should take and hold jurisdiction of the offenses.

Much feeling and bitterness were evolved in the discussion that followed the senator's statements. Yet all hindering amendments were voted down, and January 25th, the bill passed the Senate by 27 majority. In the House there was a like fiery discussion. The bill was amended so as to limit it to sections of the country where the habeas corpus remained suspended on February 1, 1866.

The Senate removed the amendment, so that the original bill passed both Houses and February 10th went to the President. He returned it with a veto. He objected to thus legislating without the new representatives and senators from the South. He declared that the bill interfered with the local administration of justice; that it was unconstitutional for the general Government to support indigent persons; that it was unreasonable to make provision for a class or color; that it was extravagantly expensive, there being $11,745,--000, according to the commissioner's estimates for the

Creative Commons License
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.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
William T. Sherman (1)
hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
February 1st, 1866 AD (1)
January 5th, 1866 AD (1)
February 10th (1)
January 25th (1)
12th (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: