states repealed the legislation of 1865.

In so far as the "Black Laws" discriminated against the Negro they were never
enforced but were suspended from the beginning by the army and the Freedmen's
Bureau. They had, however, a very important effect upon that section of
Northern opinion which was already suspicious of the good faith of the
Southerners. They were part of a plan, some believed, to reenslave the Negro
or at least to create by law a class of serfs. This belief did much to bring
about later radical legislation.

If the "Black Laws" represented the reaction of the Southern legislatures to
racial conditions, the Freedmen's Bureau was the corresponding result of the
interest taken by the North in the welfare of the Negro. It was established
just as the war was closing and arose out of the various attempts to meet the
Negro problems that arose during the war. The Bureau had always a dual nature,
due in part to its inheritance of regulations, precedents, and traditions from
the various attempts made during war time to handle the many thousands of
Negroes who came under Federal control, and in part to the humanitarian
impulses of 1865, born of a belief in the capacity of the Negro for freedom
and a suspicion that the Southern whites intended to keep as much of slavery
as they could. The officials of the Bureau likewise were of two classes: those
in control were for the most part army officers, standing as arbiters between
white and black, usually just and seldom the victims of their sympathies but
the mass of less responsible officials were men of inferior ability and
character, either blind partisans of the Negro or corrupt and subject to
purchase by the whites.

In view of the fact that the Freedmen's Bureau was considered a new
institution in 1865, it is rather remarkable how closely it followed in
organization, purpose, and methods the precedents set during the war by the