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By Root 1116 0

including Martin R. Delany, B. F. Randolph, and J. J. Wright, all of them holding posts in South Carolina.109 But many of the field agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau coveted acceptance by the communities in which they served and became malleable instruments in the hands of the planter class, eager to service their labor needs and sharing similar views about the racial character and capacity of black people and the urgent need to control them. The New Orleans Tribune tried to be as sympathetic toward the Freedmen’s Bureau as its observations would permit: in the midst of a hostile population, the agents had little choice but to act cautiously; their acquaintances were almost always whites and each day they were subjected to “false impressions and misrepresentations.” Under such conditions, the editor charged, the legitimate grievances of black laborers were understandably “treated with contempt”—that is, if they were considered at all. In a recent visit to Amite City, in St. Helena Parish, he found that most of the blacks were unaware of the presence of the Bureau. “The representatives of the federal power are lost in the crowd,” the editor observed; “and feeling themselves powerless, they are wasting time the best they can, and do not hurt the feelings of any body.” To “make Abolition a truth,” he suggested that black troops be stationed there. “Up to this time, Emancipation has only been a lie—in most of our parishes.”110

No matter how a Bureau agent interpreted his mission, the tasks he faced were formidable. At the very outset, the extent of territory for which he was responsible reduced his effectiveness. “My satrapy,” a South Carolina agent recalled, “contained two state districts or counties, and eventually three, with a population of about eighty thousand souls and an area at least two thirds as large as the state of Connecticut. Consider the absurdity of expecting one man to patrol three thousand miles and make personal visitations to thirty thousand Negroes.” The questions an agent needed to answer and act upon were equally demanding. If a slaveholder had removed his blacks during the war to a “safe” area, who bore the responsibility for returning them to their original homes? If blacks had planted crops in the master’s absence, who should reap the profits? Could a former master confiscate the personal possessions a black had accumulated as his slave? If a black woman had borne the children of a master, who assumed responsibility for them in freedom? Could the ex-slaveholders expel from their plantations the sick and elderly blacks no longer able to support themselves? Compared to the numerous disputes involving the interpretation of contracts, the division of crops, and acts of violence, these were almost trivial questions, but even the best-intentioned agents had few guidelines to help them reach a decision. The Bureau officer, a South Carolina agent recalled, needed to be “a man of quick common sense, with a special faculty for deciding what not to do. His duties and powers were to a great extent vague, and in general he might be said to do best when he did least.”111

No sooner had he taken office than the typical Bureau agent found himself besieged by planters wanting to know what terms and punishments they could impose on their blacks. That would constitute the bulk of his work, along with the many complaints of freedmen who had suffered fraud, abuse, and violence at the hands of their employers. Unfortunately, few Bureau agents possessed the ability, the patience, or the sympathy to deal with the grievances of the freedmen, even to recognize their legitimacy, and the ex-slave had no way of knowing what to expect if he should file a complaint. To do so, he might have to travel anywhere from ten to fifty miles to the nearest Bureau office, where he was apt to find an agent “who rides, dines, and drinks champagne with his employer” and viewed any complainant as some kind of troublemaker. Even the more sympathetic agents were not always able to consider the freedman’s grievances with the seriousness they deserved.