Pending such legislation the affairs of the Negro remained in control of the unpopular Freedmen's Bureau--a "system of espionage," as Judge Clayton of Alabama called it, and, according to Governor Humphreys of Mississippi, "a hideous curse" under which white men were persecuted and pillaged. Judge Memminger of South Carolina, in a letter to President Johnson, emphasized the fact that the whites of England and the United States gained civil and political rights through centuries of slow advancement and that they were far ahead of the people of European states. Consequently, it would be a mistake to give the freedmen a status equal to that of the most advanced whites. Rather, let the United States profit by the experience of the British in their emancipation policies and arrange a system of apprenticeship for a period of transition. When the Negro should be fit, let him be advanced to citizenship.

Most Southern leaders agreed that the removal of the master's protection was a real loss to the Negro which must be made good to some extent by giving the Negro a status in court and by accepting Negro testimony in all cases in which blacks were concerned. The North Carolina committee on laws for freedmen agreed with objectors that "there are comparatively few of the slaves lately freed who are honest" and truthful, but maintained that the Negroes were capable of improvement. The chief executives of Mississippi and Florida declared that there was no danger to the whites in admitting the more or less unreliable Negro testimony, for the courts and juries would in every case arrive at a proper valuation of it. Governors Marvin of Florida and Humphreys of Mississippi advocated practical civil equality, while in North Carolina and several other States there was a disposition to admit Negro testimony only in cases in which Negroes were concerned. The North Carolina committee recommended the abolition of whipping as a punishment unfit for free people, and most States accepted this principle. Even in 1865, the general disposition was to make uniform laws for both races, except in regard to violation of contracts, immoral conduct, vagrancy, marriage, schools, and forms of punishment. In some of these matters the whites were to be more strictly regulated; in others, the Negroes.