I did not find, so far as I was informed by personal observation or report, that their conduct could, on the whole, be called lawless. There was some stealing of pigs and chickens and other petty pilfering, but rather less than might have been expected. More serious depredations rarely, if ever, occurred. The vagrants were throughout very good-natured. They had their carousals with singing and dancing, and their camp-meetings with their peculiar religious programs. But, while these things might in themselves have been harmless enough under different circumstances, they produced deplorable effects in the situation then existing. Those negroes stayed away from the plantations just when their labor was most needed to secure the crops of the season, and those crops were more than ordinarily needed to save the population from continued want and misery. Violent efforts were made by white men to drive the straggling negroes back to the plantations by force, and reports of bloody outrages inflicted upon colored people came from all quarters. I had occasion to examine personally into several of those cases, and I saw in odious hospitals negroes, women as well as men, whose ears had been cut off, or whose bodies were slashed with knives, or bruised with whips or bludgeons, or punctured with shot-wounds. Dead negroes were found in considerable numbers in the country roads or on the fields, shot to death, or strung on the limbs of trees. In many districts the colored people were in a panic of fright, and the whites in a state of almost insane irritation against them. These conditions in their worst form were only local, but they were liable to spread, for there was plenty of inflammable spirit of the same kind all over the South. It looked sometimes as if wholesale massacres were prevented only by the presence of the Federal garrisons which were dispersed all over the country. [Illustration: MAJOR-GENERAL O. O. HOWARD FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN IN DECEMBER, 1862, JUST AFTER HIS PROMOTION TO MAJOR-GENERAL OF VOLUNTEERS] _The Freedmen's Bureau_