From the Southern point of view none of this legislation was regarded as a restriction of negro rights but as a wide extension to the negro of rights never before possessed, an adaptation of the white man's laws to his peculiar case. It is doubtful whether in some of the States the authorities believed that there were any discriminatory laws; they probably overlooked some of the free negro legislation already on the statute books. In Alabama, for example, General Wager Swayne, the head of the Freedmen's Bureau, reported that all such laws had either been dropped by the legislature or had been vetoed by the governor. Yet the statute books do show some discriminations. There is a marked difference between earlier and later legislation. The more stringent laws were enacted before the end of 1865. After New Year's Day had passed and the negroes had begun to settle down, the legislatures either passed mild laws or abandoned all special legislation for the negroes. Later in 1866, several States repealed the legislation of 1865. In so far as the "Black Laws" discriminated against the negro they were never enforced but were suspended from the beginning by the army and the Freedmen's Bureau. They had, however, a very important effect upon that section of Northern opinion which was already suspicious of the good faith of the Southerners. They were part of a plan, some believed, to reënslave the negro or at least to create by law a class of serfs. This belief did much to bring about later radical legislation. If the "Black Laws" represented the reaction of the Southern legislatures to racial conditions, the Freedmen's Bureau was the corresponding result of the interest taken by the North in the welfare of the negro. It was established just as the war was closing and arose out of the various attempts to meet the negro problems that arose during the war. The Bureau had always a dual nature, due in part to its inheritance of regulations, precedents, and traditions from the various attempts made during war time to handle the many thousands of negroes who came under Federal control, and in part to the humanitarian impulses of 1865, born of a belief in the capacity of the negro for freedom and a suspicion that the Southern whites intended to keep as much of slavery as they could. The officials of the Bureau likewise were of two classes: those in control were for the most part army officers, standing as arbiters between white and black, usually just and seldom the victims of their sympathies; but the mass of less responsible officials were men of inferior ability and character, either blind partisans of the negro or corrupt and subject to purchase by the whites.