Oliver Otis Howard, Autobiography of Oliver Otis Howard, major general , United States army : volume 2

[439] assigned him were novel and perplexing. He had no landmarks to guide him. The experience of France and England was even discouraging. The emancipation problem in Russia was, in many important respects, different from ours, and he could get no hints from that quarter to serve him. The failures of the past were before him, and as he thought of the causes of them, he could get but little consolation from those sources, so he addressed himself boldly to the work before him from a new standpoint. The impulses of freedom and progress were controlling the national mind; and, trusting to those impulses, he went to work on the principle that only “ideas save races.” If the negroes were to be saved and were to benefit civilization, it was to be only by making them self-relying and responsible citizens.

His first attempts therefore were to prevent pauperism, to make the freedmen and their families understand that charity should be considered odious by them, that they should work to support themselves and families, and that they should be educated.

The Bureau, at the close of the war, was the representative at the South of the best ideas of the country, promoting peace and ordaining justice. What it accomplished in this respect exceeded the expectations of its most sanguine advocates.

Let it be further remembered, to the credit of the colored race, and of the inspiration that prompted General Howard's plans, that not one insurrection, not one murder, has occurred on the part of the negroes in revenge for two centuries of slavery. Yet the two races have lived side by side, in the same neighborhoods, looking into each other's eyes, while this wonderful transformation has been going on. What a different