From the point of view of to-day it is difficult to see why the President was not right. There is no doubt that the Freedmen's Bureau with its powers, jurisdiction and charities, was a far greater source of irritation in the South than was the presence of the United States army. While its superior officers were generally men of ability and character, a large number of the subalterns were canting hypocrites and outright thieves. They kept the negroes in a state of idleness, beggary and unrest, and made them a constant danger to the life and property of the whites; and their veritable tyranny over the white population did more to destroy Union sentiment among the whites and make them regard the United States Government in a hostile light than anything which had happened during the whole course of the rebellion. It was an institution which ought to have been dispensed with the instant that the necessity which called it into existence passed away. The law of March 3d, 1865, had still about eight months to run, and Congress would be in session again four months before it would expire. There was ample opportunity for prolonging the law, and that law, it was to be presumed, was less needed in 1866 than in 1865. It took all of the party discipline of the Republicans to prevent sufficient disaffection in their ranks to sustain the President's veto. On the merits of the question alone they could not have done it. They were in error, and many of them knew it, but they were now in to fight the President and they must stand together. {90} [Sidenote: The veto overridden.] The veto of the bill was dated July 16th, and the two Houses repassed it over the veto on the same day. The new law was to be executed through the War Department, as the original measure had been, and the Secretary of War had begun to manifest that indecent hostility to the President which disgraced the last years of the Administration. The President was largely cut off from even the knowledge of what was taking place in the operations of the Freedmen's Bureau, and Mr. Stanton now managed it in such a manner, whether intentional or not, as to cause the greatest possible friction between the Government and the whites of the South, and thus to retard the process of Reconstruction and to destroy what had been already accomplished in that direction. [Sidenote: Disaffection in the Cabinet.] [Sidenote: Stanton's attitude toward the President.]