The former contained a program which was better suited to actual conditions and which might have succeeded if it had been given a fair trial.

These laws were a measure of the extent to which the average white would then go in "accepting the situation" so far as the blacks were concerned.

And on the whole the recognition of Negro rights made in these laws, and made at a time when the whites believed that they were free to handle the situation, was remarkably fair.

The Negroes lately released from slavery were admitted to the enjoyment of the same rights as the whites as to legal protection of life, liberty, and property, as to education and as to the family relation, limited only by the clear recognition of the principles of political inferiority and social separation.

Unhappily this legislation was not put to the test of practical experience because of the Freedmen's Bureau; it was nevertheless skillfully used to arouse the dominant Northern party to a course of action which made impossible any further effort to treat the race problem with due consideration to actual local conditions.
Much of the work of the Freedmen's Bureau was of only temporary benefit to both races.