Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 12.djvu/311

Rh to the Freedmen's bureau, obtained during that same trip, is of most valuable character, showing the estimate of its workings as noted by a man not a politician, but a great soldier, and one who was most instrumental in attaining success to the Union armies. From conscientious agents administering the workings of the bureau, he learned that the "belief widely spread among the freedmen of the Southern States that the lands of their former owners will at least in part be divided among them, came from agents of this bureau. This belief is seriously interfering with the willingness of the freedmen to make contracts for the coming year. . . . Many, perhaps the majority of the agents of the bureau, advise the freedmen that by their own industry they must expect to live. . . . In some instances, I am sorry to say, the freedman's mind does not seem to be disabused of the idea that he had a right to live without care or provision for the future. The effect of this belief in the division of lands is idleness and accumulation in camps, towns and cities." This is as General Grant saw it in the winter of 1865, and under the act extending and enlarging the scope and powers of the bureau, it was ten times worse afterward. He evidently then saw the drift of the work of the bureau and the aim and object of the agents. Nearly every agent became a politician in the near future and was a candidate for office. Under the congressional reconstruction they were elected to nearly all of the Federal, State and county offices by virtue of their influence over the ignorant negroes, and in effecting the organization of "Union League" clubs.

It was to the interest of the agents to create distrust and suspicion on the part of the negroes toward all Southern whites, and to cause them to look only to themselves (the agents) for justice and their rights. So long as they could cause friction, encourage idleness by raising false hopes of support and obtaining lands from the government, and create the impression that their rights