es intended to keep as much of slavery
as they could. The officials of the Bureau likewise were of two classes:
those in control were for the most part army officers, standing as
arbiters between white and black, usually just and seldom the victims of
their sympathies but the mass of less responsible officials were men of
inferior ability and character, either blind partisans of the Negro or
corrupt and subject to purchase by the whites.

In view of the fact that the Freedmen's Bureau was considered a new
institution in 1865, it is rather remarkable how closely it followed in
organization, purpose, and methods the precedents set during the war by
the officers of the army and the Treasury. In Virginia, General Butler,
in 1861, declared escaped slaves to be "contraband" and proceeded to
organize them into communities for discipline, work, food, and care. His
successors in Virginia and North Carolina, and others in the Sea Islands
of Georgia and South Carolina, extended his plan and arranged a labor
system with fixed wages, hours, and methods of work, and everywhere
made use of the captured or abandoned property of the Confederates. In
Tennessee and Arkansas, Chaplain John Eaton of Grant's army employed
thousands in a modified free labor system; and further down in
Mississippi and Louisiana Generals Grant, Butler, and Banks also put
large numbers of captured slaves to work for themselves and for the
Government. Everywhere, as the numbers of Negroes increased, the army
commanders divided the occupied Negro regions into districts under
superintendents and other officials, framed labor laws, cooperated
with benevolent societies which gave schooling and medical care to the
blacks, and developed systems of government for them.

The United States Treasury Department, attempting to execute the
confiscation laws for the benefit of the Treasury, appears now and then
as an employer of Negro labor on abandoned plantations. Either alone
or in cooperation with the army and charitable associations, it even
supervised Negro colonies, and sometimes it assumed practically complete
control of the economic welfare of the Negro. This Department introduced
in 1864 an elaborate lessee and trade system. The Negro was regarded as
"the ward of the nation," but he was told impressively that "labor is a
public duty and idleness and vagrancy a crime." All wanted him to work:
the Treasury wanted cotton and other crops to sell; the lessees and
specula