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The majority of the complaints brought before me came from Negroes. As would naturally happen to an ignorant race, they were liable to many impositions, and they saw their grievances with big eyes.… With pomp of manner and of words, with a rotundity of voice and superfluity of detail which would have delighted Cicero, a Negro would so glorify his little trouble as to give one the impression that humanity had never before suffered the like.112

The ways in which a local Bureau agent or provost marshal considered the grievance of a freedman often differed markedly from the deference paid to a prominent planter. In Liberty, Virginia, for example, the local superintendent of freedmen’s affairs—a sergeant in the Union Army—listened to a black laborer’s account of a severe beating he had suffered at the hands of his employer.

“What did you do to him? You’ve been sassy?”

“No, boss; never was sassy; never was sassy nigger sence I’se born.”

“Well, I suppose you were lazy.”

“Boss, I been working all de time; ask any nigger on de plantashn ef I’se ever lazy nigger. Me! me and dem oder boys do all de work on de plantashn same as ’foretime.”

“Well, then, what did he strike you for?”

“Dat jest it, sah. Wot’d he strike me for? Dar ar jest it. I done nothin’.”

“How many of you are there on the plantation?”

“Right smart family on de plantashn, sah. Dunno how many.”

“Did he strike any other boy but you?”

“No, sah, me one.”

“You must have been doing something?”

“No, boss; boss, I tell you; I’se in at de quarters, me and two o’dem boys, and he came in de do’, jump on me wid a stick, say ‘he teach me.’ ”

“What did you do then?”

“Run, come yer.”

“Well, now you go back home and go to your work again; don’t be sassy, don’t be lazy when you’ve got work to do; and I guess he won’t trouble you.”113

This freedman fared better than the many blacks who testified that local agents refused even to listen to their complaints but ordered them back to work and threatened them with deportation. Confronted with an employer unwilling to pay him his share of the crop and with threats to burn down his house (because he conducted classes there), a North Carolina freedman carried his appeal to General Oliver O. Howard, the Bureau’s head commissioner, after the local agent had refused to intercede.114

Even where a Bureau official tried to act on behalf of a freedman, he might find himself frustrated by military authorities, whose support he needed to enforce his decisions but whose sympathies often lay with the native whites. In some regions, military officers not connected with the Bureau collected fees for approving labor contracts and paid little attention to the provisions. Captain Randolph T. Stoops, the provost marshal in Columbia, Virginia, readily conceded his lack of concern in such matters but thought it perfectly justified. “As to the price of labour I have nothing to do with it. The citizens held a meeting some time since and made a price to suit themselves.… When Farmers bring the negro before me to have written agreements between them whatever price is agreed upon between them I enter on the article and consider them bound to fulfill the agreement whatever it may be.” Often over the protests of sympathetic Bureau agents, military authorities permitted employers to mete out punishments to recalcitrant blacks or imposed their own form of discipline. That was how Captain Stoops dealt with the problem of blacks “swarming the streets” of the town in which he was stationed. “There being no jail or place of confinement I resorted to the wooden horse and making them work on the streets. Such punishment I found beneficial for in a short time I found almost every negro for some distance, had gone to work and was doing well.… Fright has more to do with it than anything else.”115

To keep the freed slaves on the old plantations and to force them into contracts with an employer doubtless helped a local Bureau official to win a degree of toleration in an otherwise hostile community.