In May, 1865, General Howard was placed at the head of the Freedmen's Bureau; a position for which he was probably the very best man in the United States, one whose extremely noble and benevolent purpose was wholly in harmony with the loftiest traits of his own character, and whose peculiar difficulties were such as he was exactly the man to encounter, by nature, education and official position. By imagining one's self to have passed forward in history for a century or two centuries, and to be taking such a backward perspective view of the southern rebellion as such an advance would give, any mind of historic qualities will perceive more clearly than in any other way the falling off and disappearance of the minor circumstances of the great struggle, and the few great features that remain--the central facts, the real meanings of the war. Of all these, that which will remain most important is, the escape from their modern Egypt of the nation of the slaves. Lives and deeds of individual men will grow obscure. The gigantic battles, the terrific novelties, the vast campaigning combinations of the successive chapters of the war will lose their present strong colors. Even the fact that part of the white population of the United States sought in vain to sever their political union with the rest, will lose its present foremost place in the story; for it will have assumed the character of an abortive delusion; a temporary struggle, whose pretended reasons were sophistical and false, whose real ones were kept out of sight as much as possible, and which ended in the speedy re-establishment of the power attacked. But the emancipation of the slaves is an eternal epoch; it marks the point where the race of one vast continent, after centuries of exile into another continent and of the most degrading subjection to another race, is all at once let out into civilization; brought forth from the pens of beasts, to take a place among the sons of men. Yet more; they are admitted to take a place among the sons of God; for American slavery, as if with the devil's own cunning and cruel power, did really not only exclude the slave from becoming a citizen, but it actually excluded him from the power of becoming a Christian. The emancipation of the slaves was even more than the organization of a new nation; for it was the birth into humanity of a new race.