In vain were they ordered
back, in vain were bridges hewn from beneath their feet; on
they trudged and writhed and surged, until they rolled into
Savannah, a starved and naked horde of tens of thousands.
There too came the characteristic military remedy: "The
islands from Charleston south, the abandoned rice-fields along
the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country
bordering the St. John's River, Florida, are reserved and set
apart for the settlement of Negroes now made free by act of
war." So read the celebrated "Field-order Number Fifteen."
All these experiments, orders, and systems were bound to
attract and perplex the government and the nation. Directly
after the Emancipation Proclamation, Representative Eliot had
introduced a bill creating a Bureau of Emancipation; but it was
never reported. The following June a committee of inquiry,
appointed by the Secretary of War, reported in favor of a
temporary bureau for the "improvement, protection, and
employment of refugee freedmen," on much the same lines
as were afterwards followed. Petitions came in to President
Lincoln from distinguished citizens and organizations, strongly
urging a comprehensive and unified plan of dealing with the
freedmen, under a bureau which should be "charged with the
study of plans and execution of measures for easily guiding,
and in every way judiciously and humanely aiding, the passage
of our emancipated and yet to be emancipated blacks from the
old condition of forced labor to their new state of voluntary
industry.
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