of noble purpose, many of the minor officials were just as undoubtedly corrupt and self-seeking.  In the winter of 1865-6 one-third of its aid was given to the white people of the South.  For Negro pupils the Bureau established altogether 4,239 schools, and these had 9,307 teachers and 247,333 students.  Its real achievement has been thus ably summed up:  “The greatest success of the Freedmen’s Bureau lay in the planting of the free school among Negroes, and the idea of free elementary education among all classes in the South....  For some fifteen million dollars, beside the sum spent before 1865, and the dole of benevolent societies, this bureau set going a system of free labor, established a beginning of peasant proprietorship, secured the recognition of black freedmen before courts of law, and founded the free common school in the South.  On the other hand, it failed to begin the establishment of good will between ex-masters and freedmen, to guard its work wholly from paternalistic methods, which discouraged self-reliance, and to carry out to any considerable extent its implied promises to furnish the freedmen with land."[1] To this tale of its shortcomings must be added also the management of the Freedmen’s Bank, which “was morally and practically part of the Freedmen’s Bureau, although it had no legal connection with it.”  This institution made a really remarkable start in the development of thrift among the Negroes, and its failure, involving the loss of the first savings of hundreds of ex-slaves, was as disastrous in its moral as in its immediate financial consequences.

[Footnote 1:  DuBois:  The Souls of Black Folk, 32-37.]

When the Freedmen’s Bureau came to an end, it turned its educational interests and some money over to the religious and benevolent societies which had cooeperated with it, especially to the American Missionary Association.  This society had been organized before the Civil War on an interdenominational and strong anti-slavery basis; but with the withdrawal of general interest the body passed in 1881 into the hands of the Congregational Church.  Other prominent agencies were the American Baptist Home Mission Society (also the American Baptist Publication Society), the Freedmen’s Aid Society (representing the Northern Methodists), and the Presbyterian Board of Missions.  Actual work was begun by the American Missionary Association.  In 1861 Lewis Tappan, treasurer of the organization, wrote to General Butler to ask just what aid could be given.  The result of the correspondence was that on September 3 of this year Rev. L.C.  Lockwood reached Hampton and on September 17 opened the first day school among the freedmen.  This school was taught by Mrs. Mary S. Peake, a woman of the race who had had the advantage of a free mother, and whose devotion to the work was such that she soon died.  However, she had helped to lay the foundations of Hampton Institute.  Soon there was a school at Norfolk, there were two at Newport News, and by January schools