He was glad that there was a law for
him--a law that put him on the level with his old master--and
meditated gratefully, as he rode home, on what the nation had
wrought in his behalf since the time when "Marse Desmit" had sent
him along that very road with an order to "Marse Ware" to give
him "twenty lashes well laid on." The silly fellow thought that
thenceforth he was going to have a "white man's chance in life."
He did not know that in our free American Government, while the
Federal power can lawfully and properly ordain and establish the
theoretical rights of its citizens, it has no legal power to support
and maintain those rights against the encroachment of any of the
States, since in those matters the State is sovereign, and the part
is greater than the whole.
CHAPTER XIV.
BORN OF THE STORM.
Perhaps there was never any more galling and hated badge of defeat
imposed upon a conquered people than the "Bureau of Freedmen,
Refugees, and Abandoned Lands," a branch of the Federal executive
power which grew out of the necessities of the struggle to put
down rebellion, and to which, little by little, came to be referred
very many of those matters which could by no means be neglected,
but which did not properly fall within the purview of any other
branch of military administration. It is known, in these latter
days, simply as the Freedmen's Bureau, and thought to have been
a terrible engine of oppression and terror and infamy, because of
the denunciations which the former slave-owners heaped upon it,
and the usually accepted idea that the mismanaged and malodorous
Freedmen's Savings Bank was, somehow or other, an outgrowth and
exponent of this institution.
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