Almost
every one of them had won honor with the loss of limb or of health;
all had the indorsement and earnest approval of men high in command
of our armies, who had personal knowledge of their character and
believed in their fitness. This renders it all the more remarkable
that these men should so soon and so universally, as was stoutly
alleged and weakly believed, have become thieves and vagabonds
--corrupters of the blacks and oppressors of the whites. It only
shows how altogether impossible it is to foresee the consequences
of any important social or political movement upon the lives and
characters of those exposed to its influences.
When the war ended there were four millions of men, women, and
children without homes, houses, lands, money, food, knowledge, law,
right, family, friends, or possibility for self-support. All these
the Bureau adopted. They constituted a vast family of foundlings,
whose care was a most difficult and delicate matter, but there was
not one among them all who complained of the treatment they received.
It is somewhat strange, too, that the officers of this Branch of
the service should have all misbehaved in exactly the same manner.
Their acts of oppression and outrage were always perpetrated
in defence of some supposed right of a defenceless and friendless
race, overwhelmed with poverty--the bondmen of ignorance--who had
no money with which to corrupt, no art with which to beguile, and
no power with which to overawe these representatives of authority.
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