Thus it is doubly difficult to write of this period calmly, so
intense was the feeling, so mighty the human passions that
swayed and blinded men. Amid it all, two figures ever stand
to typify that day to coming ages,--the one, a gray-haired
gentleman, whose fathers had quit themselves like men, whose
sons lay in nameless graves; who bowed to the evil of slavery
because its abolition threatened untold ill to all; who stood at
last, in the evening of life, a blighted, ruined form, with hate
in his eyes;--and the other, a form hovering dark and mother-
like, her awful face black with the mists of centuries, had
aforetime quailed at that white master's command, had bent
in love over the cradles of his sons and daughters, and closed
in death the sunken eyes of his wife,--aye, too, at his behest
had laid herself low to his lust, and borne a tawny man-child
to the world, only to see her dark boy's limbs scattered to the
winds by midnight marauders riding after "damned Nig-
gers." These were the saddest sights of that woful day; and
no man clasped the hands of these two passing figures of the
present-past; but, hating, they went to their long home, and,
hating, their children's children live today.

Here, then, was the field of work for the Freedmen's
Bureau; and since, with some hesitation, it was continued by
the act of 1868 until 1869, let us look upon four years of its
work as a whole. There were, in 1868, nine hundred Bureau
officials scattered from Washington to Texas, ruling, directly
and indirectly, many millions of men. The deeds of these
rulers fall mainly under seven heads: the relief of physical
suffering, the overseeing of the beginnings of free labor, the
buying and selling of land, the establishment of schools,