In view of the fact that the Freedmen's Bureau was considered a new institution in 1865, it is rather remarkable how closely it followed in organization, purpose, and methods the precedents set during the war by the officers of the army and the Treasury. In Virginia, General Butler, in 1861, declared escaped slaves to be "contraband" and proceeded to organize them into communities for discipline, work, food, and care. His successors in Virginia and North Carolina, and others in the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina, extended his plan and arranged a labor system with fixed wages, hours, and methods of work, and everywhere made use of the captured or abandoned property of the Confederates. In Tennessee and Arkansas, Chaplain John Eaton of Grant's army employed thousands in a modified free labor system; and further down in Mississippi and Louisiana Generals Grant, Butler, and Banks also put large numbers of captured slaves to work for themselves and for the Government. Everywhere, as the numbers of negroes increased, the army commanders divided the occupied negro regions into districts under superintendents and other officials, framed labor laws, coöperated with benevolent societies which gave schooling and medical care to the blacks, and developed systems of government for them. The United States Treasury Department, attempting to execute the confiscation laws for the benefit of the Treasury, appears now and then as an employer of negro labor on abandoned plantations. Either alone or in coöperation with the army and charitable associations, it even supervised negro colonies, and sometimes it assumed practically complete control of the economic welfare of the negro. This Department introduced in 1864 an elaborate lessee and trade system. The negro was regarded as "the ward of the nation," but he was told impressively that "labor is a public duty and idleness and vagrancy a crime." All wanted him to work: the Treasury wanted cotton and other crops to sell; the lessees and speculators wanted to make fortunes by his labor; and the army wanted to be free from the burden of the idle blacks. In spite of all these ministrations the negroes suffered much from harsh treatment, neglect, and unsanitary conditions. During 1863 and 1864 several influences were urging the establishment of a national bureau or department to take charge of matters relating to the African race. Some wished to establish on the borders of the South a paid labor system, which might later be extended over the entire region, to get more slaves out of the Confederacy into this free labor territory, and to prevent immigration of negroes into the North, which, after the Emancipation Proclamation, was apprehensive of this danger. Others wished to relieve the army and the treasury officials of the burden of caring for the blacks and to protect the latter from the "northern harpies and bloodhounds" who had fastened upon them the lessee system.