for the immediate and temporary shelter and supply of
destitute refugees and freedmen, their wives and children, under such
rules and regulations as he might direct. The President was also
authorized to reserve from sale or settlement under the Homestead and
Pre-emption Laws, public lands in Florida, Mississippi and Arkansas,
not to exceed three millions of acres of good land in all, for the use
of the freedmen, at a certain rental to be named in such manner as the
Commissioner should be regulation prescribe; or the Commissioner could
purchase or rent such tracts of land in the several districts as might
be necessary to provide for the indigent refugees and freedmen
depending upon the Government for support.

It was further provided that wherever in consequence of any State or
local law any of the civil rights or immunities belonging to white
persons, such as the right to enforce contracts, to sue, to give
evidence, to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold or convey real and
personal property, were refused or denied to freedmen on account of
race or color or any previous condition of slavery or involuntary
servitude, or whenever they were subjected to punishment for crime
different from that provided for white persons, it was made the duty of
the President, through the Commissioner, to extend military
jurisdiction and protection over all cases affecting persons against
whom such unjust discriminations were made. It was made the duty of
the officers and agents of the Bureau to take jurisdiction of and to
hear and determine all cases, in which by local law discrimination was
made against the freedmen. This was to be done under such rules and
regulations as the President, through the Commissioner, might
prescribe. But the jurisdiction was to cease "whenever the
discrimination on account of which it is conferred shall cease," and
was in no event to be exercised in any State "in which the ordinary
course of judicial proceeding has not been interrupted by the
Rebellion, nor in those States after they shall have been fully
restored to their constitutional relations to the United States, and
when the courts of the State and of the United States, within their
limits, are not disturbed or stopped in the peaceable course of justice."

In the time of peace, these provisions seemed extraordinary, but the
condition of affairs, in the judgment of leading Republican statesmen,
justified their enactment. The Thirteenth Amendment, a