| | 1 | Author: | Du Bois, W. E. Burghardt | Add | | | Title: | The Freedmen's Bureau  | | | | Published: | 1994 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | THE problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the
color line; the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men
in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. It was
a phase of this problem that caused the Civil War; and however much
they who marched south and north in 1861 may have fixed on the
technical points of union and local autonomy as a shibboleth, all
nevertheless knew, as we know, that the question of Negro slavery
was the deeper cause of the conflict. Curious it was, too, how
this deeper question ever forced itself to the surface, despite
effort and disclaimer. No sooner had Northern armies touched
Southern soil than this old question, newly guised, sprang from the
earth, — What shall be done with slaves? Peremptory military
commands, this way and that, could not answer the query; the
Emancipation Proclamation seemed but to broaden and intensify the
difficulties; and so at last there arose in the South a government
of men called the Freedmen's Bureau, which lasted, legally, from
1865 to 1872, but in a sense from 1861 to 1876, and which sought to
settle the Negro problems in the United States of America. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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