As General Howard, the head of the Bureau said, this Bureau was really a government and partially ruled the South from the close of the war until 1870. “It made laws, executed them and interpreted them. It laid and collected taxes, defined and punished crime, maintained and used military force and dictated such measures as it thought necessary and proper for the accomplishment of its varied ends.” Its establishment was a herculean task both physically and socially, and it accomplished a great work before it was repudiated. Carl Schurz in 1864 felt warranted in saying, “Not half of the labor that has been done in the South this year, or will be done there next year, would have been or would be done but for the exertions of the Freedmen’s Bureau.... No other agency, except one placed there by the national government, could have wielded the moral power whose interposition was so necessary to prevent the Southern society from falling at once into the chaos of a general collision between its different elements.”[154] The nation knew, however, that the Freedmen’s Bureau was temporary. What should follow it? The attitude of the South was not reassuring. Carl Schurz reported that: “Some planters held back their former slaves on their plantations by brute force. Armed bands of white men patrolled the country roads to drive back the Negroes wandering about. Dead bodies of murdered Negroes were found on and near the highways and by-paths. Gruesome reports came from the hospitals—reports of colored men and women whose ears had been cut off, whose skulls had been broken by blows, whose bodies had been slashed by knives or lacerated by scourges. A number of such cases I had occasion to examine myself. A veritable reign of terror prevailed in many parts of the South. The Negro found scant justice in the local courts against the white man. He could look for protection only to the military forces of the United States still garrisoning the ‘states lately in rebellion’ and to the Freedmen’s Bureau.”