officers of the army and the Treasury. In Virginia, General Butler, in 1861,
declared escaped slaves to be "contraband" and proceeded to organize them into
communities for discipline, work, food, and care. His successors in Virginia
and North Carolina, and others in the Sea Islands of Georgia and South
Carolina, extended his plan and arranged a labor system with fixed wages,
hours, and methods of work, and everywhere made use of the captured or
abandoned property of the Confederates. In Tennessee and Arkansas, Chaplain
John Eaton of Grant's army employed thousands in a modified free labor system;
and further down in Mississippi and Louisiana Generals Grant, Butler, and
Banks also put large numbers of captured slaves to work for themselves and for
the Government. Everywhere, as the numbers of Negroes increased, the army
commanders divided the occupied Negro regions into districts under
superintendents and other officials, framed labor laws, cooperated with
benevolent societies which gave schooling and medical care to the blacks, and
developed systems of government for them.

The United States Treasury Department, attempting to execute the confiscation
laws for the benefit of the Treasury, appears now and then as an employer of
Negro labor on abandoned plantations. Either alone or in cooperation with the
army and charitable associations, it even supervised Negro colonies, and
sometimes it assumed practically complete control of the economic welfare of
the Negro. This Department introduced in 1864 an elaborate lessee and trade
system. The Negro was regarded as "the ward of the nation," but he was told
impressively that "labor is a public duty and idleness and vagrancy a crime."
All wanted him to work: the Treasury wanted cotton and other crops to sell;
the lessees and speculators wanted to make fortunes by his labor; and the army
wanted to be free from the burden of the idle blacks. In spite of all these
ministrations, the Negroes suffered much from harsh treatment, neglect, and
unsanitary conditions.