Year: 1866

The bill providing for an outlay OF
eleven millions of dollars for the Freed.
mems Bureau is in itself q very ques-
tionsble expenditure of the public
Unoney; but the item which apprOpri-
ates two millions of dollars for trans
portation strikes as as very singular,
and we should like to have it explain
ed. 1t cannot be required for the
transit Of the negroes who were in the
army and who have been discharged;
for, like all other soldiers. they were
furnished with the means to reach
their homes, wherever they might de-
eide them to be. It certainly is not
needed to meet any want of migration
or change of location on the part of
the freed people of the South.


No fact in nature is more clearly de-
monstrated than that the African race
are proverbial for their attachment to
the place of their birth and the spot
where they have been reared. The de-
graduation and wrongs of slavery, the
deprivation of all rights pertaining to
humanity, never created in them de-
sire to change their residence As q
class they preferred the unnumbered
horrors of bondage to departure from
their homes Those few who followed
the north star, and in search of liberty
found homes in the North and in Can
ada, yearned for the time to come when
they might revisit the old plantation
and breathe once more the congenial
Southern CLINE. Perhaps slavery had
no greater atrocity than the forced re-
moVal of the blacks from the slave
breeding States to the far South. The
dismal march of the coflie, the pangs
of compelled separation, the dreadful
doom of going to the sugar and lower
cotton States has furnished the staple
of the fiercest anti-slavery lyrics and
the most vivid abolition rhetoricl


Surely a wonderful change must have
come over that people since the chains
fell from their limbs, if Government is
required to crafty their desire to ira
vel at the amount of $2,000,000 for a
single year. Is the Freedmen's Bureau
becoming an agency for reviving the
slave trade, after the coolie plan2 We
know that in the earlier stages of its
operation, the method of disposing of
labor bore many of the features of that
obnoxious system. If man wanted q
lot of hands he would go to the proper
officer, and make an offer to the officer,
not to the persons to be employed The
officer had almost absolute power of
these poor people. They must work,
and if they did not go where he as
signed them, then they would be con-
sidered refractory, and be punished by
being sent to a penal colony, where
they would be under disgrace, and
would be required to toll without wages.
1t can be easily seen how subject such
a system was to enormous abuse 1t is
but few days since that half hun
dred human beings, confined for petty
offences, were released by order of the
court, at the request of the agents
of the bureau, in this city of Wash
ington, and shipped to Louisiana
Whether they were willing to go
to that distant land or not no NOR
tai knows Whether they are to be pro-
tected in their rights, and are to be paid
for service, no man is informed. This
only is known: that in the capital of
an American republic forty-eight col
ored persons, many of them minors,
were freighted like so many cattle
to a region that in the days
of slavery would have been re-
garded by them as the severest fate
that could have befallen them. And
this in the very week when sena-
tors were psrading the boquets pre-
sented to them for their votes on the
Civil Rights bill by their colored devo-
tees. With the tremendous power in
the hands of this Bureau to collect to-
gether this population; to impose on
them any task; to punish them or ad
Judge them at will; to consign them to
any penalty; and now, with Govern
ment authority, to transport them
without expense to the extent of two
millions per snnum; if labor should be
in great demand in certain seasons of
the Southern crop, we ask if it does
not afford such temptations as are dan
gerous for men TO withstand; and may
not this unusual and anti-republican
authority become a scandal to our
civilization, and q bhghting curse to the
unfortunate freedmen of the South p
Washington Republican.