Document 4.9.10: Excerpts from the testimony before Congress of John Minor Botts, a Unionist from Virginia, 1866.

John Minor Botts was a Unionist from Virginia.  During the war, pro-Union Southerners opposed the Confederacy.  Usually non-slaveholders, they felt dominated by the large-scale planters who controlled southern politics.  They saw the Confederate defeat as an opportunity to assert their claims.  Many entered political office, becoming known by southern Democrats as the infamous “scalawags.”  Unionists tended to regard the Freedmen’s Bureau with suspicion.  Opposition to the Bureau tended to lump all white southerners into one political party, thus minimizing differences between whites, and minimizing the political power of Unionists.  These views are evident in the following testimony, which Botts offered before Congress in 1866.

I think that one of the great difficulties in Virginia, in regard to the colored people, arises from the organization of the Freedmen’s Bureau – not that the freedmen’s Bureau is not in itself proper, and perhaps in some localities an indispensable institution, but that it stands very greatly in need or reformation. . . .

I have heard of a great many difficulties and outrages which have proceeded . . . from the ignorance and fanaticism of persons connected with the Freedmen’s Bureau, who do not understand anything of the true relation of the original masters to the slave, and who have, in many instances, held out promises and inducements which can never be realized to the negroes, which have made them entirely indifferent to work, and sometimes ill behaved.

On the other hand, there are many persons connected with the Freemen’s Bureau who have conducted themselves with great propriety; and where that has been so there has been no trouble between the whites and blacks that I know of.

Source: Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, part ii, p. 139.