This belief did much to bring about later radical legislation.
If the "Black Laws" represented the reaction of the Southern legislatures to racial conditions, the Freedmen's Bureau was the corresponding result of the interest taken by the North in the welfare of the Negro.

It was established just as the war was closing and arose out of the various attempts to meet the Negro problems that arose during the war.

The Bureau had always a dual nature, due in part to its inheritance of regulations, precedents, and traditions from the various attempts made during war time to handle the many thousands of Negroes who came under Federal control, and in part to the humanitarian impulses of 1865, born of a belief in the capacity of the Negro for freedom and a suspicion that the Southern whites intended to keep as much of slavery as they could.

The officials of the Bureau likewise were of two classes: those in control were for the most part army officers, standing as arbiters between white and black, usually just and seldom the victims of their sympathies but the mass of less responsible officials were men of inferior ability and character, either blind partisans of the Negro or corrupt and subject to purchase by the whites.
In view of the fact that the Freedmen's Bureau was considered a new institution in 1865, it is rather remarkable how closely it followed in organization, purpose, and methods the precedents set during the war by the officers of the army and the Treasury.

In Virginia, General Butler, in 1861, declared escaped slaves to be "contraband" and proceeded to organize them into communities for discipline, work, food, and care.