All this is easy, but it is neither sensible nor just. Someone
had blundered, but that was long before Oliver Howard was
born; there was criminal aggression and heedless neglect, but
without some system of control there would have been far
more than there was. Had that control been from within, the
Negro would have been re-enslaved, to all intents and pur-
poses. Coming as the control did from without, perfect men
and methods would have bettered all things; and even with
imperfect agents and questionable methods, the work accom-
plished was not undeserving of commendation.
Such was the dawn of Freedom; such was the work of the
Freedmen's Bureau, which, summed up in brief, may be
epitomized thus: for some fifteen million dollars, beside the
sums spent before 1865, and the dole of benevolent societies,
this Bureau set going a system of free labor, established a
beginning of peasant proprietorship, secured the recognition
of black freedmen before courts of law, and founded the free
common school in the South. On the other hand, it failed to
begin the establishment of good-will between ex-masters and
freedmen, to guard its work wholly from paternalistic meth-
ods which discouraged self-reliance, and to carry out to any
considerable extent its implied promises to furnish the freedmen
with land.
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