or the economics
of the plantation system impelled the owner ever to increase his
holdings. In 1870, and again in 1880, the reports show a rapid decline.
The average for the whole country went down from 199 to 134 acres in the
twenty years, as intensive agriculture advanced, but the South declined
more rapidly than the whole, and in 1880, in all but two States, the
average farm was less than half its size before the Civil War.

The vagrant, shiftless freedman was a social problem as well as
economic. To fix his new status was the effort of the legislatures that
convened in 1865, under the control of those who had qualified as loyal
in Johnson's scheme. In several States laws were passed relating to
contracts, apprenticeship, and vagrancy, under which the negro was to be
held to regular work and the employer was given the right to punish him.
The laws represented the opinion of the white citizens that special
provisions were needed to control and regulate the negro population now
that the personal bond of the owner for the good behavior of his slaves
was canceled. To the North, still excited and nervous in 1865, the laws
appeared to embody an overt attempt to restore the essentials of
slavery. They served to embitter Congress toward Johnson's plans, and to
convince Republicans that the professed loyalty of former Confederates
was hypocritical,--that these must not be permitted to return at once to
federal office or to Congress.

It was not until the summer of 1867 that Congress substituted
governments of its own design for those which Johnson had erected by
proclamation. These, meanwhile, had proceeded to revise their
constitutions and to adopt the Thirteenth Amendment, which was
proclaimed as part of the Constitution in December, 1865. The direct
hand of Congress was shown in the strengthening of the Freedmen's Bureau
in the spring of 1866, and the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in
the following summer.

The Freedmen's Bureau had its excuse in the poverty and ignorance of the
negroes who crowded about the invading armies. Toward the end of the war
it was authorized to administer abandoned property, and to aid the
freedmen in farming upon the same. It did wide charitable and
educational work in easing the abrupt change from slavery to freedom,
and would have been dissolved a year after the return of peace had not
Congress maintained it to offset the tendencies of Johnson's
administration. Hereafter the agents of