<P> In the rural South, the Freedmen's Bureau was only as strong as its isolated agents, who were often unable to assert their will over that of the whites in their jurisdiction . Manpower issues and local white resentment led to early compromises under which southern civilians were allowed to serve as magistrates on the Freedmen's Courts, although the move was opposed by many former slaves . </P> <P> In cities like Savannah, Georgia, the Freedmen's Courts appeared even more disposed to enforcing the wishes of local whites, sentencing former slaves (and veterans of the Union Army) to chain gangs, corporal punishments, and public shaming . The Savannah Freedmen's Courts even approved arrests for such "offenses" as "shouting at a religious colored meeting," or speaking disrespectfully to a white man . </P> <P> The Bureau's influence on post-war patterns of crime and punishment was temporary and limited . The United States Congress believed that only its unprecedented federal intrusion into state affairs through the Bureau could bring true republicanism to the South, according to Edward L. Ayers, but Southerners instinctively resented this as a grave violation of their own republican ideals . Southerners had always tended to circumscribe the sphere of written, institutionalized law, Ayers argues, and once they began to associate it with outside oppression from the federal government, they saw little reason to respect it at all . From this resentment, vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan arose in opposition to the Bureau and its mission--though, in the words of Ayers, the Klan was a "relatively brief episode in a long history of post-war group violence in the South," where extralegal retribution was and continued to be a tradition . </P> <P> For their part, former slaves in the Reconstruction - era South made efforts of their own to counteract white supremacist violence and injustice . In March 1866, Abraham Winfield and ten other black men petitioned the head of the Georgia Freedmen's Bureau for relief from the oppression of the Bureau's Court in Savannah--especially for Civil War veterans . In rural areas like Greene County, Georgia, blacks met vigilante violence from whites with violence of their own . But with the withdrawal of the Freedmen's Bureau in 1868 and continuing political violence from whites, blacks ultimately lost this struggle, according to historian Edward L. Ayers . Southern courts were largely unable--even they were willing--to bring whites to justice for violence against black Southerners . By the early to mid-1870s, white political supremacy had been established anew across most of the South . </P>

Probation is today’s most common form of criminal sentencing in the united states