The mastership and its fruits

the long version

An on-the-spot report on the master-slave relationship in recently freed territory in the lower Mississippi River valley. The report expresses optimism about the ability of freed slaves to adjust to the coming new order and favors grant of full civil rights and the franchise for freedmen, but it finds former slave owners unreformed and unwilling to accept the demise of plantation slavery. The report also describes the Army employment system for freedmen and the obstacles to a free labor system in the South, and it favors federal oversight of the transition from slavery to the new order in the South.