[285] it was easy enough in and near all towns actually garrisoned, and in places which were reached by rail.
Perhaps the needs, the hopes, the fears, the failures, and such progress as was made in the Bureau work for 1866 may be best illustrated by some of the work before the courts that year.
General C. H. Howard, who had succeeded General Eaton in the District of Columbia and vicinity, found it next to impossible to get the courts to allow the testimony of colored witnesses anywhere in Maryland until the effect of the United States Civil Rights Law, recently enacted, which forbade such distinction, came into play. Upon a case of great outrage, committed by a white man upon a negro, where the Bureau agent brought the white man to trial and the white man was condemned and sentenced, an appeal was taken before Judge Bowie of the Maryland Court of Appeals, and the constitutionality of the Civil-Rights-Law called in question. Judge Bowie, to our joy, July 2d, decided that colored witnesses were competent, and that the Civil-Rights-Law in this respect was constitutional. After that happy decision warrants were issued on the testimony of negroes. But the agents now found another obstacle. Constables refused to serve subpoenas for such witnesses, and even when colored men did testify, the prejudice of jurymen gave little or no weight to their testimony.
In North Carolina General Robinson, now in command, delayed the transfer of cases for trial to the civil courts, especially those where whites had committed fraud, injury, or violence upon persons of color. In July the governor wrote him: “There now exists under the laws of this State no discrimination in the administration of justice to free persons of ”
