J.D.B. De Bow was a wealthy and prominent southerner who lived through the Civil War years. He published DeBow’s Review, an influential journal, out of New Orleans, Louisiana. DeBow’s Review offered a conservative slant on the problems of Reconstruction, often echoing the paternalism of the southern White elite. DeBow offered the following testimony before Congress in 1866.

I think if the whole regulation of the negroes, or freedmen, were left to the people of the communities in which they live, it will be administered for the best interest of the negroes as well as of the white men. I think there is a kindly feeling on the part of the planters towards the freedmen. They are not held at all responsible for anything that has happened. They are looked upon as the innocent cause.

In talking with a number of planters, I remember some of them telling me they were succeeding very well with their freedmen, having got a preacher to preach to them and a teacher to teach them, believing it was for the interest of the planter to make the negro feel reconciled; for, to lose his services as a laborer for even a few months would be very disastrous. The sentiment prevailing is, that it is for the interest of the employer to teach the negro, to educate his children, to provide a preacher for him, and to attend to his physical wants. . . .

The Freedmen’s Bureau, or any agency to interfere between the freedman and his former master, is only productive of mischief. There are constant appeals from one to the other and continual annoyances. It has a tendency to create dissatisfaction and disaffection on the part of the laborer, and is in every respect in its result most unfavorable to the system of industry that is now being organized under the new order of things in the South.

Source: Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, part iv, p. 134. (Document 4.9.7)