“These Freedmen are now disposed of as follows: In military service as soldiers’ laundresses, cooks, officers’ servants and laborers in the various staff departments, 41,150; in cities, on plantations and in freedmen’s villages and cared for, 72,500. Of these 62,300 are entirely self-supporting—the same as any individual class anywhere else—as planters, mechanics, barbers, hackmen, draymen, etc., conducting on their own responsibility or working as hired laborers. The remaining 10,200 receive subsistence from the government. Three thousand of them are members of families whose heads are carrying on plantations and have under cultivation 4,000 acres of cotton. They are to pay the government for their subsistence from the first income of the crop. The other 7,200 include the paupers, that is to say, all Negroes over and under the self-supporting age, the crippled and sick in hospitals, of the 113,650, and those engaged in their care. Instead of being unproductive this class has now under cultivation 500 acres of corn, 970 acres of vegetables and 1,500 acres of cotton besides working at wood-chopping and other industries. There are reported in the aggregate over 100,000 acres of cotton under cultivation. Of these about 7,000 acres are leased and cultivated by blacks. Some Negroes are managing as high as 300 or 400 acres....”[149] The experiment at Davis Bend, Mississippi, was of especial interest: “Late in the season—in November and December, 1864,—the Freedmen’s Department was restored to full control over the camps and plantations on President’s Island and Palmyra or Davis Bend. Both these points had been originally occupied at the suggestion of General Grant and were among the most successful of our enterprises for the Negroes. With the expansion of the lessee system, private interests were allowed to displace the interest of the Negroes whom we had established there under the protection of the government, but orders issued by General N. J. T. Dana, upon whose sympathetic and intelligent co-operation my officers could always rely, restored to us the full control of these lands. The efforts of the freedmen on Davis Bend were particularly encouraging, and this property under Colonel Thomas’ able direction, became in reality the “Negro Paradise” that General Grant had urged us to make of it.”[150] The United States Treasury went further in overseeing Freedmen and abandoned lands and appointed special agents over “Freedmen’s home colonies.” Down the Mississippi Valley, General Thomas issued a lengthy series of instructions covering industry. He appointed three Commissioners to lease plantations and care for the employees; fixed the rate of wages and taxed cotton. At Newbern, N. C., there were several thousand refugees to whom land was assigned and about 800 houses rented. After Sherman’s triumphant March to the Sea, Secretary Stanton himself went to Savannah to investigate the condition of the Negroes.