een expected. More serious
depredations rarely, if ever, occurred. The vagrants were throughout
very good-natured. They had their carousals with singing and dancing,
and their camp-meetings with their peculiar religious programs. But,
while these things might in themselves have been harmless enough under
different circumstances, they produced deplorable effects in the
situation then existing. Those negroes stayed away from the
plantations just when their labor was most needed to secure the crops
of the season, and those crops were more than ordinarily needed to
save the population from continued want and misery. Violent efforts
were made by white men to drive the straggling negroes back to the
plantations by force, and reports of bloody outrages inflicted upon
colored people came from all quarters. I had occasion to examine
personally into several of those cases, and I saw in odious hospitals
negroes, women as well as men, whose ears had been cut off, or whose
bodies were slashed with knives, or bruised with whips or bludgeons,
or punctured with shot-wounds. Dead negroes were found in considerable
numbers in the country roads or on the fields, shot to death, or
strung on the limbs of trees. In many districts the colored people
were in a panic of fright, and the whites in a state of almost insane
irritation against them. These conditions in their worst form were
only local, but they were liable to spread, for there was plenty of
inflammable spirit of the same kind all over the South. It looked
sometimes as if wholesale massacres were prevented only by the
presence of the Federal garrisons which were dispersed all over the
country.

[Illustration: MAJOR-GENERAL O. O. HOWARD

FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN IN DECEMBER, 1862, JUST AFTER HIS PROMOTION TO
MAJOR-GENERAL OF VOLUNTEERS]

_The Freedmen's Bureau_

Indeed, nothing could have been more necessary at that time than the
active interposition of the Federal power between the whites and the
blacks of the South, not only to prevent or repress violent
collisions, but to start the former masters and the former slaves on
the path of peaceful and profitable cooeperation as employers and free
laborers. This was a difficult task. Northern men who had come to the
South to purchase or lease plantations enjoyed the great advantage of
having money, so that they could pay the wages of their negro laborers
in cash, which the negroes preferred. The Southern men, having been
stripped a