The agents that the Bureau could command varied all the
way from unselfish philanthropists to narrow-minded busy-
bodies and thieves; and even though it be true that the aver-
age was far better than the worst, it was the occasional fly
that helped spoil the ointment.

Then amid all crouched the freed slave, bewildered be-
tween friend and foe. He had emerged from slavery,--not the
worst slavery in the world, not a slavery that made all life
unbearable, rather a slavery that had here and there something
of kindliness, fidelity, and happiness,--but withal slavery,
which, so far as human aspiration and desert were concerned,
classed the black man and the ox together. And the Negro
knew full well that, whatever their deeper convictions may
have been, Southern men had fought with desperate energy to
perpetuate this slavery under which the black masses, with
half-articulate thought, had writhed and shivered. They wel-
comed freedom with a cry. They shrank from the master who
still strove for their chains; they fled to the friends that had
freed them, even though those friends stood ready to use
them as a club for driving the recalcitrant South back into
loyalty. So the cleft between the white and black South grew.
Idle to say it never should have been; it was as inevitable as
its results were pitiable. Curiously incongruous elements were
left arrayed against each other,--the North, the government,
the carpet-bagger, and the slave, here; and there, all the
South that was white, whether gentleman or vagabond, hon-
est man or rascal, lawless murderer or martyr to duty.