Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [286]
Consistent with such advice, Freedmen’s Bureau officials made every effort to rid the urban centers of black refugees and to force them back onto the plantations. (Ironically, the very presence of the Bureau in the towns and villages had induced many ex-slaves to settle there, thinking they might be more secure with Federal protection nearby.) A successful Bureau officer in Culpeper, Virginia, was able to report that “this village was overrun with freedmen when I took charge here, but I have succeeded in getting the most of them out into the country on farms. The freedmen are, almost without an exception, going to work, most of them by the year.”106
Having been established to facilitate the transition from slavery to freedom, the Bureau faced an admittedly immense task. With limited personnel and funds, it was forced to operate on a number of levels, providing the newly freed slaves with food rations and medical care, assisting them in their education, helping to reunite families, relocating thousands of ex-slaves on abandoned lands, and transporting still more to areas where the scarcity of labor commanded higher wages. In its most critical role as a labor mediator, the Bureau set out to correct abuses in contracts, establish “fair” wage rates, force employers to pay what they had promised, and break up planter conspiracies to depress wages. “What we wish to do is plain enough,” a Bureau officer in North Carolina announced. “We desire to instruct the colored people of the South, to lift them up from subserviency and helplessness into a dignified independence and citizenship.”107
The attempts to implement these policies and lofty objectives revealed varying ranges of competence and dedication within the Bureau’s personnel. In theory, a northern reporter wrote, the Bureau unquestionably “stands as the next friend of the blacks,” but “practically, and in the custom of the country,” he concluded after several months of observation, “it appears to stand too often as their next enemy.” The agent he met in a South Carolina community typified for him the Bureau mentality. Empowered to examine labor contracts and determine the validity of planter and freedmen grievances, he demonstrated little or no sympathy for the very people he had been dispatched to protect. “He doesn’t really intend to outrage the rights of the negroes, but he has very little idea that they have any rights except such as the planters choose to give them.” Henry M. Turner, the prominent black clergyman, shared this dim view of the Bureau in operation. Based upon his travels in Georgia and his conversations with numerous freedmen, Turner concluded that although Bureau agents professed “to do much good,” many of them appeared to be “great tyrants” who were utterly incapable of understanding the problems of his people.108
Whatever directives flowed out of the national office, the crucial power of the Freedmen’s Bureau rested with the state and local officials, many of whom were former soldiers and officers who looked upon their positions as sinecures rather than opportunities to protect the ex-slaves in their newly acquired rights. The competence of individual agents varied enormously, as did the quality of the commitment they brought to their jobs. Under difficult, even hazardous circumstances, some Bureau agents braved the opposition of native whites as well as Federal authorities to protect the freedmen from fraud, harassment, and violence; among these agents were whites imbued with the old abolitionist commitment and a small group of blacks,