How a sensible people could expect really to conduct a slave into freedom with less than this it is hard to see.  Even with such tutelage extending over a period of two or three decades, the ultimate end had to be enfranchisement and political and social freedom for those freedmen who attained a certain set standard.  Otherwise the whole training had neither object nor guarantee.  Precisely on this account the former masters opposed the Freedmen’s Bureau with all their influence.  They did not want the Negro trained or really freed, and they criticized mercilessly the many mistakes of the new Bureau.

The North at first thought to pay for the main cost of the Freedmen’s Bureau by confiscating the property of former slave owners; but finding this not in accordance with law, they realized that they were embarking on an enterprise which bade fair to add many millions to the already staggering cost of the war.  When, therefore, they saw that the abolition of slavery could not be left to the white South and could not be done by the North without time and money, they determined to put the responsibility on the Negro himself.  This was without a doubt a tremendous experiment, but with all its manifest mistakes it succeeded to an astonishing degree.  It made the immediate reestablishment of the old slavery impossible, and it was probably the only quick method of doing this.  It gave the freedmen’s sons a chance to begin their education.  It diverted the energy of the white South slavery to the recovery of political power, and in this interval, small as it was, the Negro took his first steps toward economic freedom.

The difficulties that stared reconstruction politicians in the face were these:  (1) They must act quickly. (2) Emancipation had increased the political power of the South by one-sixth.  Could this increased political power be put in the hands of those who, in defense of slavery, had disrupted the Union? (3) How was the abolition of slavery to be made effective? (4) What was to be the political position of the freedmen?

The Freedmen’s Bureau in its short life accomplished a great task.  Carl Schurz, in 1865, felt warranted in saying that “not half of the labor that has been done in the South this year, or will be done there next year, would have been or would be done but for the exertions of the Freedmen’s Bureau....  No other agency except one placed there by the national government could have wielded that moral power whose interposition was so necessary to prevent Southern society from falling at once into the chaos of a general collision between its different elements."[99] Notwithstanding this the Bureau was temporary, was regarded as a makeshift, and soon abandoned.