The very name of the Bureau stood for a thing in
the South which for two centuries and better men had refused
even to argue,--that life amid free Negroes was simply un-
thinkable, the maddest of experiments.
The agents that the Bureau could command varied all the
way from unselfish philanthropists to narrow-minded busy-
bodies and thieves; and even though it be true that the aver-
age was far better than the worst, it was the occasional fly
that helped spoil the ointment.
Then amid all crouched the freed slave, bewildered be-
tween friend and foe. He had emerged from slavery,--not the
worst slavery in the world, not a slavery that made all life
unbearable, rather a slavery that had here and there something
of kindliness, fidelity, and happiness,--but withal slavery,
which, so far as human aspiration and desert were concerned,
classed the black man and the ox together. And the Negro
knew full well that, whatever their deeper convictions may
have been, Southern men had fought with desperate energy to
perpetuate this slavery under which the black masses, with
half-articulate thought, had writhed and shivered.
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