Diary of Welles: Wednesday, February 14, 1866

Have examined the bill for the Freedmen's Bureau, which is a terrific engine and reads more like a decree emanating from despotic power than a legislative enactment by republican representatives. I do not see how the President can sign it. Certainly I shall not advise it. Yet something is necessary for the wretched people who have been emancipated, and who have neither intelligence nor means to provide for themselves. In time and briefly, if let alone, society will adapt itself to circumstances and make circumstances conform to existing necessities, but in the mean time there will be suffering, misery, wretchedness, nor will it be entirely confined to the blacks.

I am apprehensive that the efforts of our Northern philanthropists to govern the Southern States will be productive of evil, that they will generate hatred rather than love between the races. This Freedmen's Bureau scheme is a governmental enormity. There is a despotic tendency in the legislation of this Congress, an evident disposition to promote these notions of freedom by despotic and tyrannical means.

SOURCE: Gideon Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy Under Lincoln and Johnson, Vol. 2: April 1, 1864 — December 31, 1866, p. 432-3