The Thirteenth Amendment, about to be formally promulgated by the Executive Department of the Government, as incorporated in the Constitution, had made every negro a free man.
The Southern States had responded to this Act of National authority by enacting a series of laws which really introduced, as has already been shown, a new, offensive and most oppressive form of servitude.

Thus not only was rank injustice contemplated by the States lately in rebellion, but they conveyed also an insulting challenge to the authority of the Nation.

It was as if they had said to the National Government: "In order to destroy the Confederacy and restore the Union you have manumitted these black men; but we will demonstrate to you, by our local legislation, that you are powerless to give them any further freedom than we are willing to concede, and we defy you to show by what means you can achieve it!" The first answer of the National Government to this defiance was Mr.
Trumbull's bill conferring upon the Freedmen's Bureau a degree of power which combated and restrained the Southern authorities at every point where wrong was committed or menaced.

It was designed for the purpose of extending to the freeman protection against all the wrongs of local legislation, and to make him feel that the Government which had freed him would not desert him and allow his release from slavery to be made null and void.

Mr.Johnson's policy of declaring all the States at once restored to the Union and in full possession of their powers of local legislation, would carry with it necessarily the confirmation of the odious laws already enacted in those States, and also the power to make them as stringent and binding upon the freedmen as the discretion of Southern legislators might dictate.