Whilst no doubt all of the above were doing the best they knew how, the entire race of 4,000,000 of freedmen had recovered from their dance of new and glorious liberty; had opened their eyes to the stern realities of the changed situation, and settled down to steady work all over the land. Many of them crowded into the towns, cities and villages, while a host of others went to work over all the plantations and farms—some working on shares with their former masters, whilst others farmed their own lands, and did wonderfully. Many a brave old "prophecy" had been uttered that the descendants of Africans were unfit for the pursuits of freedom, and that the whole freed race would fall to pieces like a ship on the sands; but the race went steadily to work, and with some aid from the Freedman’s Bureau, they prospered from the very beginning. In short, the people now fairly began to see the beauties of personal liberty, and they had a mind to work. The American Government, however, never did a better thing than to establish that bureau, without the aid of which entire legions of colored and white people must inevitably have perished. All things, however, did not work satisfactorily, and under the crooked circumstances perhaps that was more than was to be expected. Throughout the entire South the system of working on shares was not in favor of the redeemed race in many cases. The white man had got a notion in his head that he had been cheated out of his rights, and that somehow or other, the former slave still of right belonged to him. Some of them therefore thought themselves privileged in beating the freedman out of the fruits of their toil in every possible way. If such white men were thus aggrieved over the new order of things, their wives were worse, and could find no one to comfort them! The slave was now, at least, as free as themselves, and there was no power in the land to force him back to his former condition. So they took their spite out of him by cheating him on the division of the crops, and he was obliged either to stay on the lands and be imposed upon, or leave at a loss. The public papers were full of the freedman’s complaints at the time. One way of defrauding him who did all the hard work was to open a general store for the sale of all kinds of groceries and other needful things. The accounts were cooked and managed in a way to suit the bosses, and almost everything was charged for far above the general prices of the country. Thus, when the day of settlement came, the laborer usually found himself from $50 to $200 in debt, owing to the system of thieving practiced on him by his betrayer. The Southern people generally were sullen, and almost inconsolable under the new order of things, and they refused to be comforted for a long time. Indeed, some of them are not comforted yet, and never will be. Andrew Johnson, the President, did much harm in contending for the rebels in every way in his power. In fact, he went