ithed and shivered. They welcomed freedom with a cry. They shrank
from the master who still strove for their chains; they fled to the
friends that had freed them, even though those friends stood ready to
use them as a club for driving the recalcitrant South back into
loyalty. So the cleft between the white and black South grew. Idle to
say it never should have been; it was as inevitable as its results were
pitiable. Curiously incongruous elements were left arrayed against
each other,--the North, the government, the carpet-bagger, and the
slave, here; and there, all the South that was white, whether gentleman
or vagabond, honest man or rascal, lawless murderer or martyr to duty.

Thus it is doubly difficult to write of this period calmly, so intense
was the feeling, so mighty the human passions that swayed and blinded
men. Amid it all, two figures ever stand to typify that day to coming
ages,--the one, a gray-haired gentleman, whose fathers had quit
themselves like men, whose sons lay in nameless graves; who bowed to
the evil of slavery because its abolition threatened untold ill to all;
who stood at last, in the evening of life, a blighted, ruined form,
with hate in his eyes;--and the other, a form hovering dark and
mother-like, her awful face black with the mists of centuries, had
aforetime quailed at that white master's command, had bent in love over
the cradles of his sons and daughters, and closed in death the sunken
eyes of his wife,--aye, too, at his behest had laid herself low to his
lust, and borne a tawny man-child to the world, only to see her dark
boy's limbs scattered to the winds by midnight marauders riding after
"damned Niggers." These were the saddest sights of that woful day; and
no man clasped the hands of these two passing figures of the
present-past; but, hating, they went to their long home, and, hating,
their children's children live today.

Here, then, was the field of work for the Freedmen's Bureau; and since,
with some hesitation, it was continued by the act of 1868 until 1869,
let us look upon four years of its work as a whole. There were, in
1868, nine hundred Bureau officials scattered from Washington to Texas,
ruling, directly and indirectly, many millions of men. The deeds of
these rulers fall mainly under seven heads: the relief of physical
suffering, the overseeing of the beginnings of free labor, the buying
and selling of land, the establishment of schools, the paying of
bounti