were unanswered, and indeed unanswerable: the one that the extraordinary
powers of the Bureau threatened the civil rights of all citizens; and
the other that the government must have power to do what manifestly
must be done, and that present abandonment of the freedmen meant their
practical enslavement. The bill which finally passed enlarged and made
permanent the Freedmen's Bureau. It was promptly vetoed by President
Johnson, as "unconstitutional," "unnecessary," and "extrajudicial," and
failed of passage over the veto. Meantime, however, the breach between
Congress and the President began to broaden, and a modified form of the
lost bill was finally passed over the President's second veto, July 16.

The act of 1866 gave the Freedmen's Bureau its final form,--the form by
which it will be known to posterity and judged of men. It extended
the existence of the Bureau to July, 1868; it authorized additional
assistant commissioners, the retention of army officers mustered out
of regular service, the sale of certain forfeited lands to freedmen
on nominal terms, the sale of Confederate public property for Negro
schools, and a wider field of judicial interpretation and cognizance.
The government of the un-reconstructed South was thus put very largely
in the hands of the Freedmen's Bureau, especially as in many cases
the departmental military commander was now made also assistant
commissioner. It was thus that the Freedmen's Bureau became a
full-fledged government of men. It made laws, executed them and
interpreted them; it laid and collected taxes, defined and punished
crime, maintained and used military force, and dictated such measures
as it thought necessary and proper for the accomplishment of its varied
ends. Naturally, all these powers were not exercised continuously nor to
their fullest extent; and yet, as General Howard has said, "scarcely any
subject that has to be legislated upon in civil society failed, at one
time or another, to demand the action of this singular Bureau."

To understand and criticise intelligently so vast a work, one must not
forget an instant the drift of things in the later sixties: Lee
had surrendered, Lincoln was dead, and Johnson and Congress were at
loggerheads; the Thirteenth Amendment was adopted, the Fourteenth
pending, and the Fifteenth declared in force in 1870. Guerrilla raiding,
the ever present flickering after-flame of war, was spending its force
against the Negroes, and all the South