less. A law was at work more
efficient than any on the statute-books,--Nature's primal law, "Work or
starve!" Many, probably a majority of the freedmen, worked on for their
old masters, for wages. The others, after some brief experience of
idleness and starvation, found work as best they could. No tropical
paradise of laziness was open to the Southern negro. The first Christmas
holidays, looked forward to with vague hope by the freedmen and vague
fear by the whites, passed without any visitation of angels or
insurrection of fiends. In a word, the most apparent justifications for
the reactionary legislation,--danger of rapine and outrage from
emancipated barbarians, and a failure of the essential supply of
labor--proved alike groundless.

As the facts of the situation became known, not only by Mr. Schurz's
report, but by news from the Southern capitals and by various
evidence--it was very clear that Congress could not and would not set
the seal of national authority on any such settlement as this. Granted,
and freely, that no millennium was to be expected, that a long and
painful adjustment was necessary,--yet it was out of the question that
any political theory or any optimistic hopes should induce acquiescence
in the legal establishment of semi-slavery throughout the South. It was
not Stevens's rancor, nor Sumner's unpracticability, but the serious
conviction of the North, educated and tempered by long debate and bitter
sacrifice, which ordained that the work of freedom must not be thrown
into ruins.

CHAPTER XXXI

RECONSTRUCTION: THE SECOND PLAN

Congress addressed itself, in the first instance, to extending and
prolonging that provision for the freedmen which it had already made
through the Freedmen's Bureau. A bill was reported, having the weighty
sanction of Senator Trumbull and the judiciary committee, greatly
increasing the force of officials under the Bureau; putting it under the
military administration of the President and so with the direct support
of the army; and broadening its functions to include the building of
school-houses and asylums for the freedmen, and a wide jurisdiction over
all civil and criminal cases in which local laws made an unjust
discrimination between the races. The bill passed the Senate and House,
by the full party majority. It was sent to the President, February 10,
1866, and nine days later he returned it with a veto message, calmly and
ably argued. He objected to the bil