Sidney Andrews was a newspaper correspondent sympathetic with the plight of the freedpeople.  In 1866, he published The South Since the War, an important commentary documenting his travels through the war-torn South.  This passage from that book was read into a Congressional committee report in 1871.

Of the thousand things that the bureau has done no balance sheet can ever be made. How it helped the ministers 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, . . . brought about amicable relations between employer and employed, corrected bad habits among white and blacks, restored order, sustained contracts for work, compelled attention to the statute books, . . . furthered local educational movements, . . . dignified labor, . . . rooted out old prejudices, . . . assisted the freemen to become land-owners, . . . set idlers at work, . . . carried the light of the North into the dark places of the South, steadied the negro in his struggle with novel ideas, . . . checked the passion of the whites and blacks, . . . assisted in creating a sentiment of nationality — how it did all this and a hundred-fold more, who shall ever tell?  What pen shall ever record? . . .

Success! The world can point to nothing like it in all the history of emancipation. No thirteen millions of dollars were ever more wisely spent; yet, from the beginning of this scheme has encountered the bitterest opposition and the most unrelenting hate. Scoffed at like a thing of shame, often struck and sorely wounded, sometimes in the house of its friends, apologized for rather than defended; yet with God on its side, the Freedmen’s Bureau has triumphed; civilization has received a new impulse, and the friends of humanity may well rejoice.

The bureau work is being rapidly brought to a close, and its accomplishments will enter into history, while the unfounded accusations brought against it will be forgotten. There is a day and hour when slander lives not. When the passions of men subside, and when the dust of time has well fallen, then comes the hour of calmer judgement. Many-tongued scandal has the briefest of existence. . . . Evil is quickly forgotten; truth alone is abiding.

Source: House Report no 121, 41 Cong., 2 Sess., (1871), p. 20. (Document 4.9.15)