Return to First Page-----ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY, Volume 50 (Summer 1994), p.160
The Miller case confirmed two impressions that Superintendent Willis had formed in the four months since his arrival in Paraclifta. The first concerned his attitude toward local whites, of whom he wrote, "the majority seem to have no respect for God, man, or devil, and the most utter contempt for anything that is blue or connected with the Freedmen's Bureau." Everyone seemed to carry two revolvers strapped around his waist, which the menaced New Yorker condemned as a "disgusting practice." The second involved Willis's belief that he needed to make examples of a "few violators" to establish a reputation for toughness, promptness, fearlessness, and efficiency in "reconstructing" those whites who cheated and intimidated the freed people of the area (2).
- As the Miller episode demonstrates, the white opponents of Reconstruction
often targeted the activities of men like Willis, agents of the Bureau
of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands. The bureau was a quasi-military
federal agency charged with the responsibilities of easing and speeding
the transition of the former slaves into free American citizens endowed
with equal civil rights, of administering plantation lands abandoned during
the war, and of assisting loyal refugees in returning home for a new start
(3).
- ____________________
- 2. Willis to AAAG-AFB, December 31, 1966 ("the majority," "few violators"), February 28, 1866
- ("disgusting" practice), FORA, Letters Sent.
- 3. For the organization and activities of the Freedmen's Bureau on a national level, see George R. Bentley, A
- History of the Freedmen's Bureau (Philadelphia, 1955); Paul
Skeels Pierce, The Freedmen's Bureau: A Chapter in the History of Reconstruction
(Iowa City, 1904); W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, "The Freedmen's Bureau,"
Atlantic Monthly 87 (1901): 354-365; Victoria Marcus Olds, "The
Freedmen's Bureau as a Social Agency" (Ph. D. diss., Columbia University,
1966), 110-154; John and LaWanda Cox "General Howard and the 'Misrepresented
Bureau'," Journal of Southern History 19 (1953): 427-456; John
A. Carpenter, Sword and Olive Branch: Oliver Otis Howard (Pittsburgh,
Pa., 1964); William S. McFeeley, Yankee Stepfather: General O. O. Howard
and the Freedmen (New Haven, Conn., 1968); Oliver Otis Howard, Autobiography
(2 vols., New York, 1908). Also relevant are, Leon F. Litwack, Been
in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York, 1979); Ira
Berlin, Slaves Without Masters (New York, 1974); and Patrick Groff,
"The Freedmen's Bureau in High School History Texts," Journal
of Negro Education 51 (1982): 425-433.
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