Claude G. Bowers (1878–1958) was a writer, editor, and newspaper man from Indiana. He wrote popular history, producing best-sellers on the Founding Fathers. In 1929, he took on the history of Reconstruction, an effort which resulted in The Tragic Era. The book reflected two important currents of the day. The first was Populism, a political movement of the late nineteenth century which sought to empower farmers and working-class White people. The other was White supremacy. Bowers’s interpretation of Reconstruction recapitulated the commonly-held wisdom of the day – that Reconstruction had been a scandalous experiment during which Radical Republicans sought to circumvent democracy, and solidify their political hold over the nation by enfranchising Black people and using them as their puppets.  

Meanwhile[, in spring of 1866] the Senate was brilliantly debating Trumbull’s bill continuing the Freedmen’s Bureau indefinitely, extending its operations to freedmen everywhere, authorizing the allotment of forty-acre tracts of the unoccupied lands of the South to negroes, and arming the Bureau with judicial powers to be exercised at will. Trumbull and Fessenden bore the brunt of the defense, and Hendricks, leading the attack, assailed the judicial feature, the extension of the Bureau’s power throughout the country, and the creation of an army of petty officials. “Let the friends of the negroes be satisfied to treat them as they are treated in Pennsylvania . . . in Ohio . . . everywhere where people have maintained their sanity upon the question,’ said Cowan of Pennsylvania.

With some moved by a sincere interest in the freedmen’s welfare, the average politician was thinking of the tremendous engine for party in the multitude of paid petty officials swarming over the South, for its possibilities had been tested. It was a party measure, and as such it was passed.

While still pending in Congress, the bill had been carefully studied in Administration circles and found “a terrific engine . . . a governmental monstrosity.” Such was the opinion of [President Andrew] Johnson, who calmly prepared to meet it with a veto. . . . In tense excitement, and a little dazed, the Senate sat listening to the Message. Merciless in its reasoning, simply phrased, there was no misunderstanding its meaning.  

The Bureau’s life had not expired; why pass the bill at all? it asked. And no juries in times of peace! No indictment required! No penalty stipulated beyond the will of members of the court-martial! No appeal! No write of error in any court! “I cannot reconcile a system of military jurisdiction of this kind with the Constitution,” said the President.

Where in the Constitution is authority to expend public funds to aid indigent people? Where the right to take the white man’s land and give it to others without “due process of law”? More: the granting of so much power over so many people through so many agents would enable the President, “If so disposed, to control the action of this numerous class and use them for attainment of his own political ends.” The Message closed with the Johnsonian proposition that with eleven States excluded from Congress, the bill involved “taxation without representation.”

The next day . . . the vote was taken, and the veto sustained. A prolonged hissing in the colored galleries, some cheers in the others, and the visitors were expelled. . . .But great crows with a band of music celebrated in front of the Willard, listening to the orators praising Johnson, and the “New York Tribune” declared that “the copperheads at their homes were firing guns in honor of the presidential veto.” . . .

The day after the failure of the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill, a new measure was introduced. . . .  The second Freedmen’s Bureau Bill was pushed to passage, and Johnson returned it with a veto more powerful than the first.  Many Republicans were sadly shaken, and it required vigorous application of the party’s whip to force them into line, but they yielded, and the measure passed over the veto. . . .

Left to themselves, the negroes would have turned for leadership to the native whites, who understood them best. This [to the Radicals] was the danger. Imperative, then, that they should be taught to hate — and teachers of hate were plentiful. Many of these were found among the agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and these, paid by the Government, were devoting themselves assiduously to party organization on government time.  

Over the plantations these agents wandered, seeking the negroes in their cabins, and halting them at their labors in the fields, and the simple-minded freedmen were easy victims of their guile. One of the State Commissioners of the Bureau assembled a few blacks behind closed doors in a negro’s hut, and in his official capacity informed them that the Government required their enrollment in political clubs. Thus the Bureau agents did not scruple to employ coercion.

Source: Claude G. Bowers, The Tragic Era: The Revolution after Lincoln (Cambridge, MA: Riverside, 1929), 101-3, 115, 198. (Item 4.9.B)