Neither of the two plans for guiding the freedmen into a place in the social
order--the "Black Laws" and the Freedmen's Bureau--was successful. The former
contained a program which was better suited to actual conditions and which
might have succeeded if it had been given a fair trial. These laws were a
measure of the extent to which the average white would then go in "accepting
the situation" so far as the blacks were concerned. And on the whole the
recognition of Negro rights made in these laws, and made at a time when the
whites believed that they were free to handle the situation, was remarkably
fair. The Negroes lately released from slavery were admitted to the enjoyment
of the same rights as the whites as to legal protection of life, liberty, and
property, as to education and as to the family relation, limited only by the
clear recognition of the principles of political inferiority and social
separation. Unhappily this legislation was not put to the test of practical
experience because of the Freedmen's Bureau; it was nevertheless skillfully
used to arouse the dominant Northern party to a course of action which made
impossible any further effort to treat the race problem with due consideration
to actual local conditions.

Much of the work of the Freedmen's Bureau was of only temporary benefit to
both races. The results of its more permanent work were not generally good.
The institution was based upon the assumption that the Negro race must be
protected from the white race. In its organization and administration it was
an impossible combination of the practical and the theoretical, of opportunism
and humanitarianism, of common sense and idealism. It failed to exert a
permanently wholesome influence because its lesser agents were not held to
strict accountability by their superiors. Under these agents the alienation of
the two races began, and the ill feelings then aroused were destined to
persist into a long and troubled future.