s, without leaders, without property,
and without education. Probably a fourth of them had some experience in
freedom before the Confederate armies surrendered, and the servitude of
the other three millions ended very quickly and without violence. But in
the Black Belt, where the bulk of the black population was to be found,
the labor system was broken up, and for several months the bewildered
freedmen wandered about or remained at home under conditions which were
bad for health, morals, and thrift. The Northern Negroes did not furnish
the expected leadership for the race, and the more capable men in the
South showed a tendency to go North. The unsettled state of the Negroes
and their expectation of receiving a part of the property of the whites
kept the latter uneasy and furnished the occasion of frequent conflicts.
Not the least of the unsettling influences at work upon the Negro
population were the colored troops and the agitators furnished by the
Freedmen's Bureau, the missions, and the Bureau schools. But at the
beginning of the year 1866, the situation appeared to be clearing, and
the social and economic revolution seemed on the way to a quieter ending
than might have been expected.

CHAPTER III. THE WORK OF THE PRESIDENTS

The war ended slavery, but it left the problem of the freed slave;
it preserved the Union in theory, but it left unsolved many delicate
problems of readjustment. Were the seceded States in or out of the
Union? If in the Union, what rights had they? If they were not in
the Union, what was their status? What was the status of the Southern
Unionist, of the ex-Confederate? What punishments should be inflicted
upon the Southern people? What authority, executive or legislative,
should carry out the work of reconstruction? The end of the war
brought with it, in spite of much discussion, no clear answer to these
perplexing questions.

Unfortunately, American political life, with its controversies over
colonial government, its conflicting interpretations of written
constitutions, and its legally trained statesmen, had by the middle
of the nineteenth century produced a habit of political thought which
demanded the settlement of most governmental matters upon a theoretical
basis. And now in 1865, each prominent leader had his own plan of
reconstruction fundamentally irreconcilable with all the others, because
rigidly theoretical. During the war the powers of the executive had
been greatly expanded