Circa1865

Accidental presidents like Chester Alan Arthur were the result of the war, the marriage of government and big business, the predictable Gilded Age, and rampant political corruption in the North. Conservative Southern statesmen in prewar Congresses were an impediment to the Republican revolutionaries bent on power.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Republican Political Bosses and Layers of Graft

“Chester [Alan] Arthur was an accidental president at an inopportune time, but he is part of the tapestry of who we are more than most ever have been or most of us will ever be. He was president in an un-ideological era. The Senate would shortly be dubbed the “Millionaires’ Club,” and the House of Representatives was an unruly place of loose coalitions and influence trading.   State and local politics were controlled by party machines that prized loyalty. Politicians genuflected to the concept of the public good, and they occasionally spoke of public service. But they didn’t seem to hold either very dear.

The politicians of the Gilded Age, perhaps mirroring the mood of the public, turned away from troubling intractable like freedom, democracy, equality, and attended instead to order, stability and prosperity.

Though the Republican party continued to “wave the bloody shirt” at each presidential convention, hoping to dredge up Civil War passions and eke out an advantage against the better-organized though less popular Democrats, that yielded diminishing returns. In a Gilded Age version of what-have-you-done-for-me-lately, the voting public demanded more than nostalgia for the glorious battles of Gettysburg and Antietam.

Cities were kept together by political machines, which were tight-knit organizations that corralled votes, collected a percentage of profits, and kept the peace. The machine was epitomized by Tammany Hall in New York City and its majordomo, William Marcy Tweed, a Democrat boos surrounded by a sea of Republicans. More than any mayor, “Boss” Tweed ran New York.

His men greeted immigrants as they stepped ashore in lower Manhattan, offered them money and liquor, found them work, and in return demanded their allegiance and a tithe. Supported by Irish Catholics, who made up nearly a quarter of New York’s population, Tweed held multiple offices, controlled lucrative public works projects (including early plans for Central Park), chose aldermen, and herded voters to the polls, where they drunkenly anointed the Boss’s candidates.

Tweed was gone by 1872, forced out and prosecuted, but the system kept going. Every [Northern] city had its machine, and counties did as well. National politics was simply the apex of the pyramid that rested on local bosses and layers of graft.”

(Chester Alan Arthur, Zachary Karabell, Henry holt and Company, 2004, pp. 5-6)

Famed historian Douglas Southall Freeman edited the Richmond News Leader from 1915 to 1949 and lived by the maxim prominently displayed in his office: “Time alone is irreplaceable. Waste is not.” He lived to regret supporting Woodrow Wilson’s war in 1917, feeling that he had been swept up in the psychosis of war hysteria. In his commentary on the Republican party below, Freeman mentions the notorious GOP method of ballots being “distributed wholesale to rascals who were divided into “blocks of five” and paid to cast them illegally.”

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Making the South a Political and Social Inferno

“On the political front, Freeman was writing his first partisan editorials on behalf of [Woodrow] Wilson’s reelection. Virginia was reliably Democratic . . . [and] Freeman lashed the Republicans with gusto and turned loose his most vicious attack with a history-laden philippic. “Yes, the country knows” about the Republican party he wrote:

“It knows that during the forty-seven years and more of power of their party since the close of the war between the States the Republicans, in 1876, stole the presidency, and in 1880 bought it with their “blocks of five.” It knows that they forced upon the South the reconstruction additions to the Constitution in violation of that instrument; it knows that they turned loose upon the South an army of alien cormorants to prey upon what little substance was left us after the wreck of the war.

It knows that they made parts of the South political and social infernos, and that in malice and envy they aimed to uproot and destroy the very foundations of Southern civilization. The country also knows that they, the Republicans . . . retarded Southern industrial recuperation and Development . . . bound the nation to a juggernaut of robber protection . . . and perpetuated a banking and currency system that entrenched a currency monopoly.”

Freeman tended to be more restrained in his attacks on the Republican nominee for president, former Supreme Court justice Charles Evans Hughes. “We have had in previous years a high respect for Mr. Hughes,” he wrote, “and we have believed him a man of courage and capacity.” Now that he was the leader of “the party responsible for the most criminal class legislation the United States has ever seen,” Freeman dismissed him as a “camp-following wagon-driver.”

(Douglas Southall Freeman, David E. Johnson, Pelican Publishing, 2002, pp. 120-121)

The freedmen did not receive the franchise because of their political maturity and judgment as the clear intent was to simply keep the Republican party in power. The Republican party’s Union League organization taught the Southern black man to hate his white neighbor, and to vote for Northern men whose own States had initiated Jim Crow laws. An excellent source for Northern antebellum racial views is “North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860,” Leon Litwack, Chicago, 1961.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Lincoln’s Party of White Supremacy

“The Republican leaders were quite aware in 1865 that the issue of Negro status and rights was closely connected with the two other great issues of Reconstruction – who should reconstruct the South and who should govern the country. They were increasingly conscious that in order to reconstruct the South along the lines they planned they would require the support and the votes of the freedmen.

And it was apparent to some that once the reconstructed States were restored to the Union the Republicans would need the votes of the freedmen to retain control over the national government. While they could agree on this much, they were far from agreeing on the status, the rights, the equality, or the future of the Negro.

The fact was that the constituency on which the Republican congressmen relied in the North lived in a race-conscious, segregated society devoted to the doctrine on white supremacy and Negro inferiority.

“In virtually every phase of existence,” writes Leon Litwack with regard to the North in 1860, “Negroes found themselves systematically separated from whites. They were either excluded from railway cars, omnibuses, stagecoaches, and steamboats and assigned to special “Jim Crow” sections; they sat, when permitted, in secluded and remote corners of theaters and lecture halls; they could not enter most hotels, restaurants and resorts, except as servants; they prayed in “Negro pews” in the white churches . . . Moreover, they were often educated in segregated schools, punished in segregated prisons, nursed in segregated hospitals, and buried in segregated cemeteries.”

Ninety-three per cent of the 225,000 Northern Negroes in 1860 lived in States that denied them the ballot, and 7 per cent lived in the five New England States that permitted them to vote. Ohio and New York had discriminatory qualifications that practically eliminated Negro voting.

Ohio denied them poor relief, and most States of the old Northwest had laws carrying penalties against Negroes settling in those States. Everywhere in the free States the Negro met with barriers to job opportunities, and in most places he encountered severe limitations to the protection of his life, liberty and property.

[Many Republican leaders], like Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, the close friend of Lincoln, found no difficulty in reconciling antislavery with anti-Negro views. “We, the Republican party,” said Senator Trumbull in 1858,” are the white man’s party. We are for free white men, and for making white labor respectable and honorable, which it can never be when negro slave labor is brought into competition with it.” [And] William H. Seward, who in 1860 described the American Negro as “a foreign and feeble element like the Indians, incapable of assimilation”; [and], Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, who firmly disavowed any belief “in the mental or intellectual equality of the African race with this proud and domineering race of ours.”

(Seeds of Failure in Radical Race Policy, C. Vann Woodward, New Frontiers of the American Reconstruction, Harold M. Hyman, editor, pp. 125-12”

With his war bankrupting the national treasury and consuming available gold reserves, Lincoln’s solution was to create a national banking system controlled from Washington, claiming military necessity as the reason for printing paper currency of questionable value and legality. Radical Ohio Senator John Sherman knew national banking “would centralize power in Washington” and he urged congressional colleagues to “nationalize as much as possible,” even the currency, so as to “make men love their country before their States.” All private interests, all local interests, all banking interests, the interests of individuals, everything, should be subordinate now to the interest of the Government.”

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Revolutionary War Financing Precedes the Federal Reserve

“At the time of the Civil War the [United States did not have a nationalized] system of banking and banknote currency, and one of the important matters of [Northern] war finance was the creation of such a system.

“[Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase] . . . in his report of December, 1862 . . . outlined his plan for national banks and national bank currency. What Chase proposed was a system of national banking associations under Federal supervision, which would issue bank notes based upon United States bonds and guaranteed by the Federal government.

It became law on February 25, 1863; but this law had certain defects, so that Congress faced the whole problem afresh and reframed the statute. It is therefore to the law of June 3, 1864, that one must turn for the legislative basis of the national banking system as it emerged from the Civil War. Other provisions of the act were concerned with the maintenance of a required reserve against both banknotes and deposits; the depositing of such reserve in “reserve cities” (which permitted the concentration of bankers’ funds in New York City); . . . and the use of banks as depositaries and financial agents for the government.

As a method of stimulating, or rather forcing, the sale of United States bonds, the national bank act became an essential feature of Civil War finance. After the war (1866) a tax was placed on State banknotes in order to tax them out of existence, so that national banks possessed a monopoly of banknote currency.

To think of the national banking system as a purely fiscal measure innocent of politics and free from exploitation would indeed be a naïve assumption. Investigation shows that it soon “developed into something that was neither national nor a banking system.

Instead it was a loose organization of currency factories designed to . . . [serve] commercial communities and confined…almost entirely to the New England and Middle Atlantic States.” One of the chief injustices of the system as actually administered was the favoritism shown after the war to the eastern States which received the lion’s share of the $300,000,000 of banknote circulation assigned by law as the maximum for the whole country.

As explained by George LaVerne Anderson, each State in the New England and Middle Atlantic regions obtained an amount of banknotes in excess of its quota, while not a State in the South received an amount equal to its quota.

“Massachusetts (writes Anderson) received the circulation which would have been necessary to raise Virginia, West Virginia, North and South Carolina, Louisiana, Florida and Arkansas to their legal quotas . . . The little State of Connecticut had more national bank circulation than Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, Missouri, Kentucky and Tennessee . . . Massachusetts had more than the rest of the Union exclusive of New England and Middle Atlantic States.

[An] interesting comparison [he continues] can be made between comparatively small New England towns and the Southern States. Thus Woonsocket, Rhode Island, had more national bank circulation than North and South Carolina, Mississippi and Arkansas; Waterville, Maine, had nearly as much as Alabama; New Haven, Connecticut, had more than any single Southern State.

If it be said in answer to these facts that distributing according to population is absurd . . . it should be kept in mind that not a single Southern State had obtained, by October 1869, its legal share of the $150,000,000 which was to have been apportioned according to existing banking capital, wealth and resources.”

With some modification [this] national banking system continued for half a century. Though it had some merit, it created an inelastic currency, tended toward the concentration of bank resources in New York, opened the way for serious abuse in the speculative exploitation of bank funds, and contributed to the sharp financial flurry of 1907. Proving inadequate as a nationwide control of currency and banking, it was tardily superseded by an improved plan in the federal reserve act of 1913.”

The Civil War and Reconstruction, J.G. Randall, D.C. Heath and Company, 1937, pp. 455-458)

Marylander Reverdy Johnson defended Mary Surratt in the Lincoln assassination conspiracy trial, argued that his client and others charged were civilians, and that the military commission Judge Advocate John A. Bingham convened had no jurisdiction – but to no avail. Major Bingham was a Pennsylvanian and Radical Republican appointed by Lincoln. In contrast to Bingham, Alexander H. Stephens and Jefferson Davis were the ablest constitutional scholars in the country.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

The Life and Soul of the United States Government

“Read Judge Advocate Bingham’s argument before the Military Commission in Washington in reply to Hon. Reverdy Johnson. It is rhetorical sophistry, specious and plausible to the careless and uninformed reader; but it is utterly fallacious. It affects me in nothing so much as in the sadness it produces when I view it as but an additional evidence that Power, in its incipient and dangerous strides in trampling on the liberties of a country, is never wanting in able and brilliant advocates and defenders.

[Bingham’s] main ground, [is] that the Constitution . . . is intended and made for peace only and not for war, is fundamentally wrong. The Constitution was made for war as well as peace. To the various questions put by the Judge Advocate: Whether in war, men are not slain, prisoners captured, property taken, all without due process of law; the answer is, that they are not; no more than a man who, in peace, puts himself in defiance of the law officers, and is shot down by the sheriff or his posse: that is due process of law in such case. So in war.

In the cases of rebellion and insurrection, the only military forces known to the Constitution are such as are called out in the nature and character of the posse comitatus. For their government, when so called out, laws are made, as well as for the government of such permanent force as may be kept on hand. What a soldier rightfully does in taking life in battle he does according to law prescribed, and orders given in accordance with that law.

No soldiers, even in war, can be rightfully quartered on any man’s premises except in accordance with law previously described. This is an express provision of the Constitution. The idea that the Constitutional guarantees are all suspended in war and that during war martial law takes the place of the Constitution is monstrous.

The Judge Advocate’s remark about the natural principles of self-defence, and that the nation, as a man, may resort to any means to save its life, is rhetoric and not argument; its sentiment is ruinous to liberty. The life and soul of the United States Government is the Constitution and the principles with all the rights therein guaranteed. Whoever strikes at them, or at one of the least of them, strikes a deadly blow at the life of the Republic.

Nothing can be more absurd than that the life of a man can be preserved by an extinction or suspension of all the vital functions of his organism; and yet this is no more absurd than is the argument of those who speak of warding off a blow at the life of the nation, by a suspension or violation of the guarantees of the Constitution.”

(Recollections of Alexander H. Stephens, His Diary, Myrta Lockett Avary, LSU Press, 1998 (Original 1910), pp. 291-293)

As in the postwar South, the Republican party believed the votes of Rhode Island’s colored population were for sale – the following early 1880s resolution was apparently aimed at black Republican voters: “Resolved: That we will hold in contempt, as a traitor to mankind and his race, that man who will permit his vote to be influenced by a tender of money or any other corrupting influences.”  It should be remembered that Providence, Rhode Island was the highly-profitable center of the slave trade in North America in 1750.

Bernhard Thuersam, ww.circa1865.org

Free Colored People Unhappy in Rhode Island

“Colored Voters: The colored voters of Rhode Island, who have long complained of the treatment which they have steadily received at the hands of the Republican party in the State — they being unrecognized as citizens, neglected and totally ignored in regard to their political rights, excepting that of suffrage, which is eagerly sought for — assembled in convention at Newport on the 18th of October, 1882, to express and make known their sentiments.

Several public speakers of high repute among them addressed the convention, set forth in plain language, besides other causes of complaint, that the colored voters were highly insulted by the [Republican] party in power, as they were not considered worthy being voted for, for any public offices in the gift of the people; declaring also that henceforward they intended to act independently of the Republican party on all occasions, but vote for the person, whatever the party to which he might belong, who would recognize them as citizens.

The colored people of the State numbered 6271 in 1875, and 6592 in 1880.”

(Rhode Island, Appleton’s Annual Cyclopedia, 1882, Appleton & Company, pp. 791-792)

The following was a September 27, 1957 editorial by US News Report editor David Lawrence.  An activist Supreme Court had just used questionable sociological reasoning, not law, to call for the desegregation of schools in the United States.  Lawrence reviewed the alleged constitutional basis for the Court’s decision, and the illegality of that basis.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

“There is No Fourteenth Amendment” 

“A mistaken belief—that there is a valid article in the Constitution known as the “Fourteenth Amendment”– is responsible for the Supreme Court decision of 1954 and the ensuing controversy over desegregation in the public schools of America.

No such amendment was ever legally ratified by three-fourths of the States of the Union as required by the Constitution itself.

The so-called “Fourteenth Amendment” was dubiously proclaimed by the Secretary of State on July 20, 1868. The President shared that doubt. There were 37 States in the union at that time, so ratification by at least 28 was necessary to make the amendment an integral part of the Constitution. Actually, only 21 States legally ratified it. So it failed ratification.

The undisputed record, attested by official journals and the unanimous writings of historians, establishes these events as occurring in 1867 and 1868:

Outside the South, six States—New Jersey, Ohio, Kentucky, California, Delaware and Maryland—failed to ratify the proposed amendment.

In the South, ten States—Texas, Arkansas, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi and Louisiana—by formal action of their legislatures, rejected it under the normal processes of civil law.

A total of 16 legislatures out of 37 failed legally to ratify the “Fourteenth Amendment.”

Congress—which had deprived the Southern States of their seats in the Senate—did not lawfully pass the resolution of submission in the first instance.

The Southern States which had rejected the amendment were coerced by a federal statute passed in 1867 that took away the right to vote or hold office from all citizens who had served in the Confederate army. Military governors were appointed and instructed to prepare a roll of voters. All this happened in spite of the presidential proclamation of amnesty previously issued by the president. New legislatures were thereupon chosen and forced to “ratify” under penalty of continued exile from the union. In Louisiana, a General sent down from the north presided over the State legislature.

Abraham Lincoln had declared many times that the union was “inseparable” and “indivisible.” After his death and when the war was over, the ratification by the Southern States of the 13^th Amendment abolishing slavery had been accepted as legal. But Congress in the 1867 law imposed the specific conditions under which the Southern States would be “entitled to representation in Congress.”

Congress, in passing the 1867 law that declared the Southern States could not have their seats in either the Senate or House in the next session unless they ratified the “Fourteenth Amendment”, took an unprecedented step. No such right—to compel a State by an act of Congress to ratify a constitutional amendment—is to be found anywhere in the Constitution. Nor has this procedure ever been sanctioned by the Supreme Court of the United States.

President Andrew Johnson publicly denounced this law as unconstitutional. But it was passed over his veto.

Secretary of State Seward was on the spot in July 1868 when the various “ratifications” of a spurious nature were placed before him. The legislatures of Ohio and New Jersey had notified him that they rescinded their earlier action of ratification. He said in his official proclamation that he was not authorized as Secretary of State “to determine and decide doubtful questions as to the authenticity of the organization of State legislatures or as to the power of State legislatures to recall a previous act or resolution of ratification”.

He added that the amendment was valid “if the resolutions of the legislatures of Ohio and New Jersey, ratifying the aforesaid amendment, are to be deemed as remaining of full force and effect, notwithstanding the subsequent resolutions of the legislatures of these States.”

This was a very big “if.” It will be noted that the real issue therefore is not only whether the forced “ratification” by the ten Southern States was lawful, but whether the withdrawal by the legislatures of Ohio and New Jersey—two northern States—was legal.

The right of a State, by action of its legislature to change its mind at any time before the final proclamation of ratification is issued by the Secretary of State has been confirmed with other constitutional amendments.

The Oregon Legislature in October 1868 — three months after the Secretary’s proclamation was issued—passed a rescinding resolution , which argued that the “Fourteenth Amendment” had not been ratified by three-fourths of the States and that the “ratifications” in the Southern States “were usurpations, unconstitutional, revolutionary and void” and that “until such ratification is completed, any State has a right to withdraw its assent to any proposed amendment.”

What do the historians say about all this? The Encyclopedia Americana states:

“Reconstruction added humiliation to suffering . . . Eight years of crime, fraud and corruption followed and it was State legislatures composed of Negroes, carpetbaggers and scalawags who obeyed the orders of generals and ratified the amendment.”

W.E. Woodward, in his famous work “A New American History” published in 1936 says:

“To get a clear idea of the succession of events let us review [President Andrew] Johnson’s actions in respect to the ex-Confederate States.

In May 1865, he issued a Proclamation of Amnesty to former rebels. Then he established provisional governments in all the Southern States. They were instructed to call Constitutional Conventions. They did. New State governments were elected.

White men only had the suffrage (the Fifteenth Amendment establishing equal voting rights had not yet been passed). Senators and Representatives were chosen but when they appeared at the opening of Congress they were refused admission. The States governments however continued to function during 1866.

“Now we are in 1867. In the early days of that year Thaddeus Stevens brought in, as Chairman of the House Reconstruction Committee, a bill that proposed to sweep all the Southern State governments into the wastebasket. The South was to be put under military rule.

“The bill passed. It was vetoed by Johnson and passed again over his veto. In the Senate it was amended in such fashion that any State could escape from military rule by ratifying the Fourteenth Amendment and admitting black as well as white men to the polls.”

In challenging its constitutionality, President Johnson said in his veto message:

“I submit to Congress whether this measure is not in its whole character, scope and object without precedent and without authority, in palpable conflict with the plainest provisions of the Constitution, and utterly destructive of those great principles of liberty and humanity for which our ancestors, on both sides of the Atlantic, have shed so much blood and expended so much treasure.”

Many historians have applauded Johnson’s words. Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, known today as “liberals”, wrote in their book “The Growth of the American Republic”:

“Johnson returned the bill with a scorching message arguing the unconstitutionality of the whole thing and most impartial students have agreed with his reasoning.”

James Truslow Adams, another noted historian writes in his “History of the United States”: “The Supreme Court had decided three months earlier in the Milligan case…that military courts were unconstitutional except under such war conditions as might make the operation of civil courts impossible, but the president pointed out in vain that practically the whole of the new legislation was unconstitutional….There was even talk in Congress of impeaching the Supreme Court for its decisions! The legislature had run amok and was threatening both the Executive and the Judiciary.”

Actually, President Johnson was impeached but the move failed by one vote in the Senate.

The Supreme Court in case after case, refused to pass on the illegal activities involved in the “ratification”. It said simply that they were acts of the “political departments of the government”. This of course was a convenient device of avoidance. The Court has adhered to that position ever since Reconstruction days.

Andrew C. McLaughlin, whose “Constitutional History of the United States” is a standard work, writes: “Can a State which is not a State and not recognized as such by Congress, perform the supreme duty of ratifying an amendment to the fundamental law? Or does a State — by congressional thinking — cease to be a State for some purposes but not for others?

This is the tragic history of the so-called “Fourteenth Amendment” — a record that is a disgrace to free government and a “government of law.” Isn’t the use of military force to override local government what we deplored in Hungary?

It is never too late to correct an injustice. The people of America should have an opportunity to pass on an amendment to the Constitution that sets forth the right of the federal Government to control education and regulate attendance at public schools either with federal power alone or concurrently with the States.

That’s the honest way, the just way to deal with the problem of segregation or integration in the schools. Until such an amendment is adopted, the “Fourteenth Amendment” should be considered null and void.

There is only one supreme tribunal — it is the people themselves. Their sovereign will is expressed through the procedures set forth in the Constitution itself.”

Northern Republicans and local scalawags made every effort to frighten voters against Democratic rule in postwar North Carolina. The Republican press gave assurances that should Democrats win they would levy a tax to pay for lost slaves, abolish public schools and Jefferson Davis would be made president of the university with the obscene annual salary of ten thousand dollars. In a campaign speech, black Republican candidate from Chowan County named Page said “If we get control of the convention, we will give the white folks hell, damn them.” (Hamilton, Reconstruction in North Carolina, pg. 633)

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Senatorial Deceptions and Conjures

“The [North Carolina] Constitutional Convention of 1875 may be likened, not inaptly, to the Mecklenburg Declaration. But the new assertion of independence did not need any Bill of Rights precedent to incorporate the causes of discontent in the hearts of North Carolinians or to catalogue the rights for which they yearned. It was a protest against actual wrongs inflicted; against malicious bonds fastened on a people held in the grip of unrestrained military power.

The [Mecklenburg] Resolves were to right wrongs and even those were expressed in moderate tone. The Republicans were reinforced by a body of well-trained black voters, enfranchised ostensibly for freedom’s sake, really to keep a standing political army in the Southern electorate.

Banking on the Negro disposition, the schemers in the Republican party planned to amuse them with baubles. Not even this was necessary. No colored man voted with a sure-enough white man. If he did, he was a son of Belial and an outcast from his color.

[At the convention were] Negroes of education and no education [and] a carpet-bag writer of agnostic pamphlets who believed in all the isms except the isms of the Bible. There was a particularly contentious radical Negro, a boaster of his mulatto blood. Another as black as the Duke of Hell’s boots, whose newspaper name was “Archives of Gravity.”

Also, there was a contest in Robeson County where the Republicans tried to overturn a Democratic victory by herding and voting a number of Negro laborers working on railroad construction. Then there was William H. Moore, a coal-black Negro from New Hanover County, conjure doctor. Think of the wealthiest constituency in the State having such a senator!

But that is what Reconstruction meant. When [Moore] left the senate he became what is called a conjure doctor and prospered sufficiently on the ignorance of his patients to maintain a handsome horse and buggy and many other comforts with which his victims had no acquaintance.

On one occasion an unusually ignorant woman believed she had swallowed a spring lizard and that he could cure her. That was an easy matter. The next day after procuring a small lizard and bringing it along with him together with a harmless emetic, he threw her into a spasm of nausea and by an adroit bit of legerdemain produced the lizard which he had bought.

This almost miraculous feat added greatly to his prestige and his pocketbook. I asked him if he were not ashamed to practice such deceptions. His answer was very frank.

“There was no way to deal with a fool who thought she had swallowed a lizard but by getting the lizard. I did it and she was cured. No other doctor could have done any more.”

(Southern Exposure, Peter Mitchel Wilson, UNC Chapel Hill, 1927, pp. 97-110)

Fort McHenry’s Prisoner of State

“The grandson of the author of the Star Spangled Banner, Francis Key Howard, editor of The Exchange Newspaper of Baltimore, had been arrested on the morning of the 13th of September 1861, about 1 o’clock, by the order of General [Nathaniel P.] Banks, and taken to Fort McHenry.

He says (Fourteen Months in American Bastille, page 9):

“When I looked out in the morning, I could not help being struck by an odd and not pleasant coincidence. On that day forty-seven years before my grandfather, Mr. F.S. Key, then prisoner on a British ship, had witnessed the bombardment of Fort McHenry. When on the following morning the hostile fleet drew off, defeated, he wrote the song so long popular throughout the country, the Star Spangled Banner. As I stood upon the very scene of that conflict, I could not but contrast my position with his, forty-seven years before.”

(The Real Lincoln, L.C. Minor, Everett Waddey Company, 1928, (Sprinkle Publications 1992, pp. 148-149)

With Southern conservatives absent from the United States Congress after the war, Whig/Republicans had free rein for legislation and schemes to benefit the corporate interests which kept them in power.  Thus the Northern marriage of government and corporations gave birth to public treasury-raiding schemes like the Credit Mobilier scandal, and all under the watchful eye of President U.S. Grant.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Credit Mobilier’s Gentlemen Thieves

“The looting of the Erie Railroad was accomplished with the help of the easily corruptible legislatures of only two States, New York and New Jersey. It was a fairly simple business. But to loot the immense federal project of the Union Pacific Railroad required far more sophisticated talents. This monumental piece of thievery involved United States representatives and senators. It involved cabinet officers, the Vice-President of the United States, and a future President. The loot ran to approximately forty-four million dollars. It was removed almost painlessly from the Union Pacific’s coffers by a trick outfit with a fancy French name, the Credit Mobilier.

The Union Pacific was sponsored and financed by the United States. The purpose of the Credit Mobilier was to take over the contract for building the road. Stockholders of both companies were identical. They proceeded to contract with themselves to build the road at a cost calculated to exhaust the resources of the Union Pacific. The so-called profits were to be divided among Credit Mobilier stockholders.

Prominent in Credit Mobilier were Oakes and Oliver Ames, brothers of Easton, Massachusetts, who had inherited a business . . . [and the] Hon. Oakes Ames was a representative of the old Bay State in Congress.

From the day it was whelped, the double-jointed money-making machine worked perfectly. As the tracks of the Union Pacific pushed across the Great Plains, the Credit Mobilier collected the enormous bounty granted to the line from the public purse and domain. Mile upon mile the railroad was systematically stripped of its cash, which reappeared almost simultaneously as dividends for the happy stockholders of Credit Mobilier. It was, as the Hon. Oakes Ames told his comrades in the House, “a diamond mine.”

Yet the gentlemen-thieves of Credit Mobilier had a falling out when two factions fought for control; and the warfare gave those senators and congressmen who were not involved the courage to demand an investigation of the Union Pacific-Credit Moblier situation.

In an effort to forestall just such a possibility, the Credit Mobilier officers had been distributing free stock in the House and Senate, and elsewhere. But Congress was at last forced to act, and the revelations of its investigating committee . . . were so appalling that “all decent men trembled for the honor of the nation.”

No one was more hopelessly involved in the scandal than Vice-President Schuyler Colfax . . . except of course, Representative Oakes Ames of Massachusetts . . . along with Representative Brooks, also of Massachusetts . . .

Although the Congressional investigation resulted in an almost complete official whitewash, it did leave strong doubt in many minds regarding the character of such eminent men as James A. Garfield, James G. Blaine, and almost a score more.”

(The Age of the Moguls, Stewart H. Holbrook, Doubleday & Company, 1953, pp. 49-50)