appeared in the
offices of the Freedmen's Bureau. This had been established by Congress,
in March, 1865, with the laudable design of helping to adjust the
freedmen to their new condition; to make temporary provision for the
extreme physical wants of some; to aid them in arrangements for labor
and education; and, as was at first contemplated, to lease to them
abandoned or confiscated lands, in plots of forty acres, for three
years. This land provision was soon abandoned, there being no
confiscation to provide the necessary land; but it started the
expectation of "forty acres and a mule," which misled many a freedman.
As chief of the Bureau was appointed General O. O. Howard, a
distinguished Union commander, of the highest personal character, and
entirely devoted to his new work; and under him was a commissioner with
a working force in each of the States. The Bureau accomplished
considerable good; but its administration on the whole was not of the
highest class; among its subordinates were some unfit men; and a good
deal of offense and irritation attended its operations. At most, it
touched only the circumference of the problem. Three and a half millions
of newly enfranchised, ignorant men, women and children! What should
provide for the helpless among them, especially for the children, whom
the master's care had supported? How should order be maintained in the
lower mass, half-brutalized, whom slavery had at least restrained from
vagabondage, rapine, and crime? And how should the whole body be induced
to furnish the dynamic, driving power of industry essential to the
community's needs? These questions the South essayed to answer in part
by a system of laws, of which we may take as a fair specimen the
legislation of Mississippi--the only State which had enacted this class
of laws before Congress met,--as they are summarized in the thorough and
impartial book of Professor J. W. Burgess, _Reconstruction and the
Constitution_.

The law of apprenticeship ran thus: Negro children under eighteen,
orphans or receiving no support from their parents, to be apprenticed,
by clerk of probate court, to some suitable person,--by preference the
former master or mistress; the court to fix the terms, having the
interest of the minor particularly in view; males to be apprenticed till
end of twenty-first year, females to end of eighteenth. No other
punishment to be permitted than the common law permits to a parent or
guardian. If the appre