assistant commissioner for each of the Southern States. These officials and
other employees must take the "ironclad" oath.

It was planned that the Bureau should have a brief existence, but the
institution and its wards became such important factors in politics that on
July 16, 1866, after a struggle with the President, Congress passed an act
over his veto amplifying the powers of the Bureau and extending it for two
years longer. This continuation of the Bureau was due to many things: to a
belief that former slaveholders were not to be trusted in dealing with the
Negroes; to the baneful effect of the "Black Laws" upon Northern public
opinion; to the struggle between the President and Congress over
reconstruction; and to the foresight of radical politicians who saw in the
institution an instrument for the political instruction of the blacks in the
proper doctrines.

The new law was supplementary to the Act of 1865, but its additional
provisions merely endorsed what the Bureau was already doing. It authorized
the issue of medical supplies, confirmed certain sales of land to Negroes, and
provided that the promises which Sherman made in 1865 to the Sea Island
Negroes should be carried out as far as possible and that no lands occupied by
blacks should be restored to the owners until the crops of 1866 were gathered;
it directed the Bureau to cooperate with private charitable and benevolent
associations, and it authorized the use or sale for school purposes of all
confiscated property; and finally it ordered that the civil equality of the
Negro be upheld by the Bureau and its courts when state courts refused to
accept the principle. By later laws the existence of the Bureau was extended
to January 1, 1869, in the unreconstructed States, but its educational and
financial activities were continued until June 20, 1872.

The chief objections to the Bureau from the conservative Northern point of