However, two hundred and forty-four years of slavery could not be stopped by edict.  There were legal difficulties, the whole slow problem of economic readjustment, and the subtle and far-reaching questions of future race relations.

The peculiar circumstances of emancipation forced the legal and political difficulties to the front, and these were so striking that they have since obscured the others in the eyes of students.  Quite unexpectedly and without forethought the nation had emancipated four million slaves.  Once the deed was done, the majority of the nation was glad and recognized that this was, after all, the only result of a fearful four years’ war which in any degree justified it.  But how was the result to be secured for all time?  There were three possibilities:  (1) to declare the slave free and leave him at the mercy of his former masters; (2) to establish a careful government guardianship designed to guide the slave from legal to real economic freedom; (3) to give the Negro the political power to guard himself as well as he could during this development.  It is very easy to forget that the United States government tried each one of these in succession and was literally forced to adopt the third, because the first had utterly failed and the second was thought too “paternal” and especially too costly.  To leave the Negroes helpless after a paper edict of emancipation was manifestly impossible.  It would have meant that the war had been fought in vain.

Carl Schurz, who traversed the South just after the war, said, “A veritable reign of terror prevailed in many parts of the South.  The Negro found scant justice in the local courts against the white man.  He could look for protection only to the military forces of the United States still garrisoning the states lately in rebellion and to the Freedmen’s Bureau."[98] This Freedmen’s Bureau was proposed by Charles Sumner.  If it had been presented to-day instead of fifty years ago, it would have been regarded as a proposal far less revolutionary than the state insurance of England and Germany.  A half century ago, however, and in a country which gave the laisser faire economics their extremest trial, the Freedmen’s Bureau struck the whole nation as unthinkable, save as a very temporary expedient and to relieve the more pointed forms of distress following war.  Yet the proposals of the Bureau were both simple and sensible: 

1.  To oversee the making and enforcement of wage contracts for freedmen.

2.  To appear in the courts as the freedmen’s best friend.

3.  To furnish the freedmen with a minimum of land and of capital.

4.  To establish schools.

5.  To furnish such institutions of relief as hospitals, outdoor relief stations, etc.