In 1871, Congress began an intensive investigation into the activities of the Ku Klux Klan throughout the South. Concerned that the Klan was denying freedpeople their civil rights, Republicans in Congress heard testimony from hundreds of southerners, White and Black, conservative and radical.  The resulting transcripts offer a wealth of information on southern life during the Reconstruction. The following testimony of an Alabama planter named Daniel Taylor offers insights into the ways the Freedmen’s Bureau was perceived by many southern White planters.

The negroes that would go and settle down on plantations and work and stay there always had plenty to eat. The white men who employed them felt bound to keep them in plenty to eat and good clothes to wear when they would stay with them.

But if a man was trying to make a negro work, and talked a little short to the negro, he [the negro] would pick up and go somewhere else. . . . The negroes would quit and go off for this Bureau when they should have had a dependence in the country. They depended upon the Bureau for their rations. . . .

The negroes cheated the farmers out of their labor. . . . The negroes were to pay for their provisions out of their part of the crop and they did not go on making their crop, so that their part of the crop was not sufficient to pay the owner the amount that was due him for the land and stock and the advance.

Source: Ku Klux Klan Report, Alabama Testimony (1871), 1132. (Document 4.9.9)