The Freedmen's Bureau had its excuse in the poverty and ignorance of the negroes who crowded about the invading armies. Toward the end of the war it was authorized to administer abandoned property, and to aid the freedmen in farming upon the same. It did wide charitable and educational work in easing the abrupt change from slavery to freedom, and would have been dissolved a year after the return of peace had not Congress maintained it to offset the tendencies of Johnson's administration. Hereafter the agents of the Bureau were thrown into politics until 1872. The permanent government of the conquered South by the army was repugnant to even radical Northerners, yet the white inhabitants were Democratic almost to the last man, and if restored to civil rights would control their States. The only means of developing a Southern Republican party that might keep the South "loyal" was the enfranchisement of the freedman, for which purpose the Fourteenth Amendment was submitted. The agents of the Bureau were expected not only to feed and clothe the negroes, but to impress upon them the fact that they owed their freedom to the Republicans. Some spread the belief that the Democrats desired to restore slavery. Many built up personal machines. The responsibility upon these white directors of the negro vote was great, and was too often betrayed. Generally not natives, and with no stake in the Southern community, they lined their own pockets and earned the unkindly name of "carpet-baggers." The Territories had always known something of this type of ruler, but the States, hitherto, had known bad government only when they made it themselves. The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 ordered the President to divide the South into five military districts, whose commanders should supersede all the state officers whom Johnson had restored. With troops behind them, these commanders were, first, to enroll on the voting list all males over twenty-one. The negroes, before the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, were thus given by Congress the right to vote in their respective States, and were included in the lists. Excluded from the lists were the leaders of every Southern community, those whites who had held important office in the Confederacy; and none was to be enrolled, white or black, until he had taken an ironclad and offensive oath of allegiance. Based upon the list of voters thus made up, state conventions were to be summoned to revise the constitutions. In every case they must modify the laws to admit the status of the freedmen, must ratify the Fourteenth Amendment with its guaranty of civil rights, and must extend the right of suffrage to the blacks. When all these things had been done, with army officers constantly in supervision, the resulting constitutions were to be submitted to Congress for final approval or rejection.