So their shared, already-understood animosity to the Freedmen’s Bureau, which needed nothing but laughter and hisses to convey, made it easy for the president to shift all the many problems of post–Civil War America—its corruption, concentration of power, low wages, and inadequate housing—onto African Americans and their “blood-sucker” advocates in Congress, radical Republicans such as Thaddeus Stevens and Wendell Phillips, who were trying to fund the bureau.
