All this vast expenditure
of money and brains might have formed a great school of
prospective citizenship, and solved in a way we have not yet
solved the most perplexing and persistent of the Negro
problems.
That such an institution was unthinkable in 1870 was due
in part to certain acts of the Freedmen's Bureau itself. It came
to regard its work as merely temporary, and Negro suffrage
as a final answer to all present perplexities. The political
ambition of many of its agents and proteges led it far afield
into questionable activities, until the South, nursing its own
deep prejudices, came easily to ignore all the good deeds of
the Bureau and hate its very name with perfect hatred. So the
Freedmen's Bureau died, and its child was the Fifteenth
Amendment.
The passing of a great human institution before its work is
done, like the untimely passing of a single soul, but leaves a
legacy of striving for other men. The legacy of the Freedmen's
Bureau is the heavy heritage of this generation. To-day, when
new and vaster problems are destined to strain every fibre of
the national mind and soul, would it not be well to count this
legacy honestly and carefully? For this much all men know:
despite compromise, war, and struggle, the Negro is not free.
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