There is no question that this was a most humane measure. It would have been a moral outrage for the Government of the United States to have taken the slaves away from the support and protection accorded {45} them by their masters, and to have thrown them upon their own resources without any means of sustenance during the transition into the new status. But there is also no question that this measure was so administered as to do the race for whose benefit it was intended almost as much harm as good. When the Government began to furnish them with food, clothes, fuel and shelter gratis, they, like the children that they were, conceived of this, to them, very agreeable state of things as something that was to last forever, as the New Jerusalem. They gathered about the depots of the Freedmen's Bureau and could not be induced to go away in search of work or livelihood. The belief became quite general that the Government intended to give every man forty acres of land and a mule, and otherwise to support him permanently. The danger was that the newly emancipated would quit work altogether and throw themselves entirely upon the charity of the United States Government. Many did do so, and formed thus a sort of privileged class throughout the whole South under the special protection of the Government of the United States. [Sidenote: Vagrancy, apprenticeship and civil rights in the reconstructed "States."] When, now, the newly reorganized "States" came to assume jurisdiction over matters concerning the freedmen, they found themselves driven to some legislation to prevent the whole negro race from becoming paupers and criminals. It was in the face of such a situation that the legislatures of these "States" passed laws concerning apprenticeship, vagrancy and civil rights, which were looked upon at the North as attempts to re-enslave the newly emancipated, and served to bring the new "State" governments at the South into deep reproach. [Sidenote: Examination of these vagrancy acts, etc.]