Freedmen’s Bureau misled the Negroes and caused the first breach between them and their former masters. Ignorance and truculence characterized almost every act of that unhappy time. Nearly every mistake that could be made was made on both sides. Measures that were designed with the best intentions were so administered as to bring these intentions to wreck.

On the emancipation of the slaves, the more enlightened whites of the South saw quite as clearly as any person at the North could have[Pg 38] seen the necessity of some substitute for the former direction and training of the Negroes, and schools were started in many places by the old masters for the colored children.[16]

[Pg 38]

Teachers and money had come from the North for the education of the Negroes, and many schools were opened. But the teachers, at first, devoted as many of them were, by their unwisdom alienated the good-will of the whites and frustrated much of the good which they might have accomplished. They might have been regarded with distrust in any case, for no people look with favor on the missionaries who come to instruct them as to matters of which they feel they know much more than the missionaries, and the South regarded jealously any teaching of the Negroes which looked toward equality. The new missionaries went counter to the deepest prejudice of the Southern[Pg 39] people. They lived with the Negroes, consorting with them, and appearing with them on terms of apparent intimacy, and were believed to teach social equality, a doctrine which was the surest of all to arouse enmity then as now. The result was that hostility to the public-school system sprang up for a time. In some sections violence was resorted to by the rougher element, though it was of short duration, and was always confined to a small territory.[17] Before long, however, this form of opposition disappeared and the public-school system became an established fact.

[Pg 39]

The next step in the alienation of the races was the formation of the secret order of the Union League. The meetings were held at night, with closed doors, and with pickets guarding the approaches, and were generally under the direction of the most hostile members of the Freedmen’s Bureau. The whites regarded this movement with serious misgivings, as well they might, for, having as its basic principle the consolidation of the Negro race against the white race, it banded the Negroes in an organization which, with the exception[Pg 40] of the Confederate Army, was the most complete that has ever been known in the South, and the fruits of 

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