The first answer of the National Government to this defiance was Mr. Trumbull's bill conferring upon the Freedmen's Bureau a degree of power which combated and restrained the Southern authorities at every point where wrong was committed or menaced. It was designed for the purpose of extending to the freeman protection against all the wrongs of local legislation, and to make him feel that the Government which had freed him would not desert him and allow his release from slavery to be made null and void. Mr. Johnson's policy of declaring all the States at once restored to the Union and in full possession of their powers of local legislation, would carry with it necessarily the confirmation of the odious laws already enacted in those States, and also the power to make them as stringent and binding upon the freedmen as the discretion of Southern legislators might dictate. The war would thus have practically injured the negro, for after taking from him that form of protection which slavery afforded, it would have left him an object of still harsher oppression than slavery itself--an oppression that would be inspired and quickened by a spirit of vengeance. The bill was debated at full length, nearly every prominent man in the Senate taking part. Mr. Hendricks of Indiana and Mr. Garrett Davis of Kentucky opposed it in speeches of excessive bitterness, and Mr. Guthrie of Kentucky with equal earnestness but less passion. It was sustained with great ability by all the leading Republican senators; and on the final passage, in an unusually full Senate, the vote in its favor was 37; those opposed were 10. There were only three absentees. Even those Republican senators who had given strong evidence of sympathy with the Administration did not unite with the Democrats on this issue. Mr. Cowan declined to vote, while Messrs. Dixon, Doolittle and Norton voted in the affirmative. The public opinion of the country unmistakably sustained this legislation--the purpose to extend protection to the freedmen being deep-set and all-pervading among the men of the North who had triumphed in the war. When the bill reached the House it was referred to the Select Committee on Freedmen's Affairs, of which Mr. Thomas D. Eliot of Massachusetts was chairman. It was promptly reported and came to a final vote on the 6th of February, when it was passed on a call of yeas and nays by 136 to 33. It was a clear division upon the line of party, the nays being composed entirely of Democrats, with the possible exception of Mr. Rousseau of Kentucky, who had been elected with the aid of Republican votes.