South to purchase or lease plantations enjoyed the great advantage of
having money, so that they could pay the wages of their negro laborers
in cash, which the negroes preferred. The Southern men, having been
stripped almost naked by the war, had, aside from current sustenance,
only prospective payment to offer, consisting mostly of a part of the
crop. While many planters were just and even liberal in the making of
cash contracts, others would take advantage of the ignorance of the
negroes and try to tie them down to stipulations which left to the
laborer almost nothing, or even obliged him to run in debt to his
employer, and thus drop into the condition of a mere peon, a
debt-slave. It is a very curious fact that some of the forms of
contract drawn up by former slaveholders contained provisions looking
to the probability of a future restoration of slavery. There was, not
unnaturally, much distrust of the planters among the negroes, who, in
concluding contracts, feared to compromise their rights as freemen or
to be otherwise overreached. To allay that distrust and, in many
cases, to secure their just dues, they stood much in need of an
adviser in whom they had confidence and to whom they could look for
protection, while, on the other hand, the employers of negro labor
stood in equal need of some helpful authority to give the colored
people sound instruction as to their duties as freemen and to lead
them back to the path of industry and good order when, with their
loose notions of the binding force of agreements, they broke their
contracts, or indulged themselves otherwise in unruly pranks.

To this end the "Freedmen's Bureau" was instituted, an organization of
civil officials who were, with the necessary staffs, dispersed all
over the South to see that the freedmen had their rights and to act as
intermediaries between them and the whites. The conception was a good
one, and the institution, at the head of which General O. O. Howard