Oliver Otis Howard, Autobiography of Oliver Otis Howard, major general , United States army : volume 2

[440] spectacle presents itself on the blood-drenched sands of the Antilles under French rule. Ours was the substitution of moral for brute force.

It may be well to state, in this connection, that it was in a freedmen's court that colored persons were first admitted to testify in any of the late slave States. To-day all the courts are open to them, and a colored senator sits at the other end of the Capitol and assists in making laws for those courts.

Not less potent has been the influence of the Bureau on the labor question. At the close of the war famine looked the South in the face. There was a cry for bread throughout the Southern country. It was sneeringly said by the enemies of emancipation that the negro would not labor. Satisfied by the Bureau that contracts would be enforced, that justice would be administered, with words of encouragement whispered in his ear, the negro went to work. The battle-plowed, trampled fields of the South yielded a wealth of production that seemed not the result of human labor, but as if “ earth had again grown quick with God's creating breath.” The crops at the South have been larger proportionately since the war than at any previous date.

An article by Sidney Andrews, in the February number of Old and New, makes the following concise and truthful statement of the workings of the Bureau:

“Of the thousand things that the Bureau has done no balance sheet can ever be made. How it helped the ministries of the church, saved the blacks from robbery and persecution, enforced respect for the negro's rights, instructed all the people in the meaning of the law, threw itself against the stronghold of intemperance, settled neighborhood quarrels, brought about amicable relations between employer and employed, ”