Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/339

Rh people, a not inconsiderable number, followed the natural impulse of testing the quality of their freedom by walking away from the places on which they had been held to labor, and by wandering to the nearest town or military post “to have a good time” for a while. Still others made contracts with the planters and then broke them with or without cause. All this and much more of the same sort would, under the circumstances, not have appeared surprising to cool and unprejudiced minds, but rather as the inevitable concomitant of so great a revolution as was the sudden liberation from slavery of several millions of human beings. These were comparatively slight disorders which, if kindly and prudently met, would in a great measure soon have been righted. But against these irregular movements, “physical compulsion,” without which, in the Southerner's opinion, the negroes would not work at all, was fiercely put in action. Some planters held back their former slaves on their plantations by brute force. Armed bands of white men patrolled the country roads to drive back the negroes wandering about. Dead bodies of murdered negroes were found on and near the highways and by-paths. Gruesome reports came from the hospitals—reports of colored men and women whose ears had been cut off, whose skulls had been broken by blows, whose bodies had been slashed with knives or lacerated with scourges. A number of such cases I had occasion to examine myself. A veritable reign of terror prevailed in many parts of the South. The negro found scant justice in the local courts against the white man. He could look for protection only to the military forces of the United States still garrisoning the “States lately in rebellion” and to the Freedmen's Bureau—that Freedmen's Bureau, the original purpose of which was to act as an intermediary between the planters and the emancipated slaves, the white and the black, to aid them in the making