T.W. Conway was a chaplain in the Union Army, who served as head of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Louisiana. His tenure was not successful, and he was eventually removed. He began touring the North, speaking on the importance of the Bureau for southern blacks. This passage is taken from his testimony to Congress.

I should expect in Louisiana, as in the whole southern country, that the withdrawal of the Freedmens Bureau would be followed by a condition of anarchy and bloodshed. . .  I am pained at the conviction that I have in my own mind that if the Freedmen’s Bureau is withdrawn the result will be fearful in the extreme.

What it has already done and is now doing in shielding these people, only incites the bitterness of their foes. They will be murdered by wholesale, and they in their turn will defend themselves. It will not be persecution merely; it will be slaughter; and I doubt whether the world has ever known the like.

These southern rebels, when the power is once in their hands, will stop at nothing short of extermination. Governor Wells himself told me that he expected in ten years to see the whole colored race exterminated, and that conviction is shared very largely among the white people of the south. It has been threatened by leading men there that they would exterminate the freedmen. . . . The wicked work has already commenced, and it could be shown that the policy pursued by the government is construed by the rebels as not being opposed to it.

Source: Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, part iv, 82. (Document 4.9.14)