If, passing from general considerations, we examine the bill in detail,
it is open to weighty objections.
In time of war it was eminently proper that we should provide for
those who were passing suddenly from a condition of bondage to a state
of freedom. But this bill proposes to make the Freedmen's Bureau,
established by the act of 1865 as one of many great and extraordinary
military measures to suppress a formidable rebellion, a permanent branch
of the public administration, with its powers greatly enlarged. I have
no reason to suppose, and I do not understand it to be alleged, that
the act of March, 1865, has proved deficient for the purpose for which
it was passed, although at that time and for a considerable period
thereafter the Government of the United States remained unacknowledged
in most of the States whose inhabitants had been involved in the
rebellion. The institution of slavery, for the military destruction of
which the Freedmen's Bureau was called into existence as an auxiliary,
has been already effectually and finally abrogated throughout the whole
country by an amendment of the Constitution of the United States, and
practically its eradication has received the assent and concurrence of
most of those States in which it at any time had an existence.
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