offenses,
and in South Carolina the master might "moderately correct" servants
under eighteen years of age. Other punishments were generally the same
for both races, except the hiring out for petty offenses.

From the Southern point of view none of this legislation was regarded
as a restriction of Negro rights but as a wide extension to the Negro of
rights never before possessed, an adaptation of the white man's laws
to his peculiar case. It is doubtful whether in some of the states
the authorities believed that there were any discriminatory laws; they
probably overlooked some of the free Negro legislation already on the
statute books. In Alabama, for example, General Wager Swayne, the head
of the Freedmen's Bureau, reported that all such laws had either been
dropped by the legislature or had been vetoed by the governor. Yet the
statute books do show some discriminations. There is a marked difference
between earlier and later legislation. The more stringent laws were
enacted before the end of 1865. After New Year's Day had passed and the
Negroes had begun to settle down, the legislatures either passed mild
laws or abandoned all special legislation for the Negroes. Later in
1866, several states repealed the legislation of 1865.

In so far as the "Black Laws" discriminated against the Negro they were
never enforced but were suspended from the beginning by the army and the
Freedmen's Bureau. They had, however, a very important effect upon that
section of Northern opinion which was already suspicious of the good
faith of the Southerners. They were part of a plan, some believed, to
reenslave the Negro or at least to create by law a class of serfs. This
belief did much to bring about later radical legislation.

If the "Black Laws" represented the reaction of the Southern
legislatures to racial conditions, the Freedmen's Bureau was the
corresponding result of the interest taken by the North in the welfare
of the Negro. It was established just as the war was closing and arose
out of the various attempts to meet the Negro problems that arose
during the war. The Bureau had always a dual nature, due in part to its
inheritance of regulations, precedents, and traditions from the various
attempts made during war time to handle the many thousands of Negroes
who came under Federal control, and in part to the humanitarian impulses
of 1865, born of a belief in the capacity of the Negro for freedom and
a suspicion that the Southern whit