But I cannot forbear adding that the report from the Commissioners on Freedmen, appointed by the Secretary of War, accumulates ample testimony on this head, all showing that the freedmen are anxious to find employment.

It is evident, then, that the freedmen are not idlers.

Somebody must take them by the hand,--not to support them, but simply to help them obtain the work which will support them.

The intervention of the National Government is necessary.

Without such intervention, many of those poor people, freed by our acts in the exercise of a military necessity, will be left to perish.

This alone can supply the adequate machinery, and extend the proper network of assistance, with the proper unity of operation.

The National Government must interfere in the case, precisely as in building the Pacific Railroad.

Private charity in our country is active and generous; but it is powerless to cope with the evils arising from a wicked institution; nor can it provide a remedy, where society itself is overthrown.

There are few who will not admit that something must be done by the Government.

Cold must be the heart that could turn away from this call.

Faithful labor and reasonable wages: let these be secured, and everything else will follow.

Call it charity or duty, it is sacred as humanity.

In the first place, everybody who has had any practical experience of the working of the plantations or of the superintendence of negro labor will tell you that the control of the abandoned plantations and the care of the colored people…

It will never do to have Treasury agents who lease the lands to white men, and War Department agents who assign the same lands to colored people.

The assignment of the abandoned or forfeited plantations to one department of the Government, and the protection and support of the emancipated people to another, is a fundamental error productive of incalculable evils, and cannot be too…

All, without exception, declare that no system can avail to effect the great objects contemplated that does not assign to one and the same authority the care and disposal of the abandoned plantations and the care and protection of the…

With the heavy burdens of his department resting on his shoulders, he does not desire any additional labor; but he does not conceal his conviction that the care of the freedmen must for the present be associated with the care of the lands.

The first thought of all should be for the freedmen.

There is another point, which ought not to be passed over in silence, arising from the just desire to protect the freedmen from any system of serfdom or enforced apprenticeship.

It is well known that among former slave-masters there are many who continue to count upon appropriating the labor of their slaves, if not under the name of Slavery, at least under some other system by which freedmen shall be effectually…

This very phrase “held to service,” standing alone, is the pleonastic definition of Slavery itself.

In this respect the House bill was thought to be fatally defective, inasmuch as it interposed no positive safeguards.

But when we take into consideration the selfish tendencies of business, the disposition of the strong to appropriate the labor of the weak, and the reluctance of slave-masters to renounce habitual power, I have felt that Congress would…

This infinite wrong must not be allowed to skulk in serfdom or compulsory labor.

Once free, always free,”--such is the maxim of justice and jurisprudence.