Page:Annual report of the superintendent of Negro Affairs in North Carolina, 1864.djvu/64

62 be hoped they may not be disappointed. If this war, terminated as it has been in the success of the Union arms, means anything, it means that thought and speech and instruction at the South are now and forever free. If it be not so, we had better go to fighting again. The last school-teacher has been banished. The last preacher of liberty has been silenced. The last propagandist of liberal ideas has been hooted and proscribed by a tyranneous and brutal public opinion. An idea may now march, with the step of a conqueror, over every foot of Southern soil. The shadow of Bunker Hill monument reaches to the Rio Grande. Over this whole area truth and error may now grapple upon a fair field, and the right will have no odds against her. Sooner or later negro suffrage must come, not however without earnest and protracted agitation. While several of the powerful free states of the North are still holding the black man aloof from the ballot box, it was hardly to be expected that he should emerge from abject slavery in the South, and rise at one bound to this high privilege of citizenship. But he is fast vindicating his fitness for it, by the sword, by mental progress, by dignified acceptance of his new condition, and a certain noble bearing in it, and he will do it yet more by his industry, thrift, economy, and evident fitness to become the honest American yeoman, paying his taxes, bearing the burdens of society, and contributing to the common welfare. As great interest is felt at the present time, in the new Bureau of Freedmen's Affairs, the act of Congress establishing the same is here given.

Be it enacted, By the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That there is hereby established in the War Department, to continue during the present war of rebellion, and for one year thereafter, a bureau of refugees, freedmen, and abandoned lands, to which shall be committed, as hereinafter provided, the supervision and management of all abandoned lands, and the control of all sutjects relating to refugees and freedmen from rebel states, or from any district of country within the territory embraced in the operations of the army, under such rules and regulations as may be prescribed by the head of the bureau and approved by the President. The said bureau shall be under the management and control of a commissioner to be appointed by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, whose compensation shall be three thousand dollars per annum, and such number of clerks as may be assigned to him by the Secretary of War, not exceeding one chief clerk, two of the fourth class, two of the third class, and five of the first class. And the commissioner and all persons appointed under this act, shall, before entering upon their duties, take the oath of office prescribed in an act entitled, "An act to prescribe an oath of office, and for other purposes," approved July second, eighteen hundred and sixty-two, and the commissioner and the chief clerk shall, before entering upon their duties, give bonds to the treasurer of the United States, the former in the sum of fifty thousand dollars, and the latter in the sum of ten thousand dollars, conditioned for the faithful discharge of their duties respectively, with securities to be approved as sufficient by the Attorney-General, which bonds shall be filed in the office of the first comptroller of the treasury, to be by him put in suit for the benefit of any injured party upon any breach of the condition thereof. . 2. And be it further enacted, That the Secretary of War may direct such issues of provisions, clothing, and fuel, as he may deem needful for the