Large Blacks are exceedingly docile, and the ears, hanging well forward over the eyes, contribute materially to a quietness of habit which renders them peculiarly adapted to field grazing.
The work of the bureau may be classified as follows: (1) distributing rations and medical supplies among the blacks; (2) establishing schools for them and aiding benevolent societies to establish schools and churches; (3) regulating labour and contracts; (4) taking charge of confiscated lands; and (5) administering justice in cases in which blacks were concerned.
A powerful section contended that the basis should be the body of legal voters, on the ground that the South could not then secure an increment of political powet on account of the emancipated blacks unless these blacks were admitted to political rights.
This was accompanied by an extensive employment of slave labour, and from 1820 until 1860 the rate of increase of the blacks was greater than that of the whites.
The elections were controlled for a few years, and violence was checked, but the Ku Klux movement went on until it accomplished its object by giving protection to the whites, reducing the blacks to order, replacing the whites in control of society and state, expelling the worst of the carpet-baggers and scalawags, and nullifying those laws of Congress which had resulted in placing the Southern whites under the control of a party composed principally of ex-slaves.
Its establishment was due partly to the fear entertained by the North that the Southerners if left to deal with the blacks would attempt to re-establish some form of slavery, partly to the necessity for extending relief to needy negroes and whites in the lately conquered South, and partly to the need of creating some commission or bureau to take charge of lands confiscated in the South.
The rapidity of the movement has not been exceptional in Arkansas, but the size of its average farm, less in 1850 than that of the other cotton states, was in 1900, 93.1 acres (108.8 for white farmers alone, 49 o for blacks alone), which was even less than that of the North Atlantic states (96.5 acres, the smallest sectional unit of the Union).
Able-bodied blacks were enlisted in the army, and the women, children and old men were settled in large camps on confiscated Southern property, where they were cared for alternately by the war department and by the treasury department until the organization of the Freedmen's Bureau.
The sirdar made an attempt to raise a battaliQn of Albanians, but the few men obtained mutinied when ordered to proceed to the Sudan, and it was deemed advisable, after the ringleaders had been executed, to abandon the idea, and rely on blacks to stiffen the fellahin.
The whites who were responsible for the conduct of the blacks were warned or driven away by social and business ostracism or by violence.