The Souls of Black Folk | Page 9

these and other ways
were camp-life and the new liberty demoralizing the freedmen. The
broader economic organization thus clearly demanded sprang up here
and there as accident and local conditions determined. Here it was that
Pierce's Port Royal plan of leased plantations and guided workmen
pointed out the rough way. In Washington the military governor, at the
urgent appeal of the superintendent, opened confiscated estates to the
cultivation of the fugitives, and there in the shadow of the dome
gathered black farm villages. General Dix gave over estates to the
freedmen of Fortress Monroe, and so on, South and West. The
government and benevolent societies furnished the means of cultivation,
and the Negro turned again slowly to work. The systems of control,
thus started, rapidly grew, here and there, into strange little
governments, like that of General Banks in Louisiana, with its ninety
thousand black subjects, its fifty thousand guided laborers, and its
annual budget of one hundred thousand dollars and more. It made out
four thousand pay-rolls a year, registered all freedmen, inquired into
grievances and redressed them, laid and collected taxes, and established
a system of public schools. So, too, Colonel Eaton, the superintendent
of Tennessee and Arkansas, ruled over one hundred thousand freedmen,
leased and cultivated seven thousand acres of cotton land, and fed ten
thousand paupers a year. In South Carolina was General Saxton, with
his deep interest in black folk. He succeeded Pierce and the Treasury
officials, and sold forfeited estates, leased abandoned plantations,
encouraged schools, and received from Sherman, after that terribly
picturesque march to the sea, thousands of the wretched camp
followers.
Three characteristic things one might have seen in Sherman's raid
through Georgia, which threw the new situation in shadowy relief: the

Conqueror, the Conquered, and the Negro. Some see all significance in
the grim front of the destroyer, and some in the bitter sufferers of the
Lost Cause. But to me neither soldier nor fugitive speaks with so deep a
meaning as that dark human cloud that clung like remorse on the rear of
those swift columns, swelling at times to half their size, almost
engulfing and choking them. 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."
Some half-hearted steps were taken to accomplish this, in part, by
putting the whole matter again in charge of the special Treasury agents.
Laws of 1863 and 1864 directed them to take charge of and lease
abandoned lands for periods not exceeding twelve months, and to
"provide in such leases, or otherwise, for the employment and general
welfare" of the freedmen. Most of the army officers greeted this as a

welcome relief from perplexing "Negro affairs," and Secretary
Fessenden, July 29, 1864, issued an excellent system of regulations,
which were afterward closely followed by General Howard. Under
Treasury agents, large quantities of land were leased in the Mississippi
Valley, and many Negroes were em- ployed; but in August, 1864, the
new regulations were suspended for reasons of "public policy," and the
army was again in control.
Meanwhile Congress had turned its attention to the subject; and in
March the House passed a bill by a majority of two establishing a
Bureau for Freedmen in the War Department. Charles Sumner, who
had charge of the bill in the Senate, argued that freedmen and
abandoned lands ought to be under the same department, and reported a
substitute for the House bill