As the Union armies proceeded to occupy the South, the Union League sent its agents among the disaffected Southern people. Its agents cared for negro refugees in the contraband camps and in the North. In such work the League coöperated with the various Freedmen's Aid Societies, the Department of Negro Affairs, and later with the Freedmen's Bureau. Part of the work of the League was to distribute campaign literature, and many of the radical pamphlets on reconstruction and the negro problem bore the Union League imprint. The New York League sent out about seventy thousand copies of various publications, while the Philadelphia League far surpassed this record, circulating within eight years four million five hundred thousand copies of 144 different pamphlets. The literature consisted largely of accounts of "Southern outrages" taken from the reports of Bureau agents and similar sources. With the close of the Civil War the League did not cease its active interest in things political. It was one of the first organizations to declare for negro suffrage and the disfranchisement of Confederates; it held steadily to this declaration during the four years following the war; and it continued as a sort of bureau in the radical Republican party for the purpose of controlling the negro vote in the South. Its representatives were found in the lobbies of Congress demanding extreme measures, endorsing the reconstruction policies of Congress, and condemning the course of the President. After the first year or two of reconstruction the Leagues in the larger Northern cities began to grow away from the strictly political Union League of America and tended to become mere social clubs for members of the same political belief. The eminently respectable Philadelphia and New York clubs had little in common with the leagues of the Southern and Border States except a general adherence to the radical program.