Robert B. Mitchell's Blog, page 6

Oakes Ames, salesman

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Many of the most dramatic moments of the Credit Mobilier scandal occurred during the hearings held in the winter of 1872-1873 by the investigative committee led by Rep. Luke Potter Poland, R-Vt.

But it could be argued that the most significant events in the tawdry tale occurred four years earlier, during the late months of 1867 and the first few months of 1868.

Congress and the nation were preoccupied by the struggle over Reconstruction that pitted President Andrew Johnson against Radical Republicans who feared – correctly – that the Tennessean elevated to the presidency following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln sought to leave newly freed slaves at the mercy of their former masters. The confrontation escalated to impeachment and a Senate trial.

While the battle between Congress and Johnson dominated the headlines, Rep. Oakes Ames of Massachusetts was looking out for the interests of the Union Pacific Railroad and the company that profited from its construction.

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Rep. Oakes Ames. Library of Congress/

Ames, railroad financier known as the “King of Spades” because of his family’s famous shovel-making business, was a leading stockholder in the railroad and Credit Mobilier, which made its money by overcharging the railroad for construction and taking payment in railroad bonds and securities. Many of Credit Mobilier’s leading investors were, like Ames, also stockholders in the railroad.

In 1866, the Union Pacific suffered a pair of embarrassing legislative defeats on Capitol Hill. Congress allowed the Central Pacific to build its line farther east into territory that had originally been reserved for the Union Pacific. Lawmakers also allowed a Kansas-based railroad, originally intended as a feeder line for the Union Pacific, to extend to Kansas. The Kansas road then became, as Ames put it later, a rival instead of a partner to the Union Pacific.

He was determined not to let that happen again and decided to make the lucrative Credit Mobilier stock the tool to protect the railroad’s interests on Capitol Hill. As he confided to his fellow Credit Mobilier investor, Henry S. McComb: “We want more friends in this Congress, & if a man will look into the law (and it is difficult to get them to do it unless they have an interest to do so) he cannot help being convinced that we should not be interfered with.”

According to members of Congress who testified to the Poland committee, the Massachusetts Republican congressman began to offer to sell Credit Mobilier stock at their face value of $100 per share, well below their actual value, in the fall of 1867.

Sen. James Patterson, a New Hampshire Republican, told the Poland committee that Ames came to the Senate “[n]ear the close of 1867” to offer thirty shares. “He represented at the time that he did this as a friend, looking to my interest.”

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Thomas Nast’s verdict on Credit Mobilier. Library of Congress.

Patterson initially denied – rather sanctimoniously – that he bought Credit Mobilier shares but was forced to return to the committee to admit that he had, in fact, bought the stock. The former school teacher squirmed “like one of the delinquents he used to torture” as he made his confession, according to the New York Sun.

Hoosier Schuyler Colfax, testifying to the Poland committee as his term as vice president was coming to an end, recalled the Ames approached him about Credit Mobilier on the House floor while Colfax was serving as Speaker in late 1867. Colfax told investigators that Ames made the investment sound “good and safe” but told Ames he didn’t have the money.

Colfax resolutely insisted to the end that he never bought shares in Credit Mobilier, but the preponderance of evidence indicates that he did — and that he profited handsomely.

Others approached by Ames pleaded poverty. Reps. James A. Garfield and William “Pig Iron” Kelley each told the King of Spades they could not afford to buy Credit Mobilier shares. But Ames was undeterred.

Kelley’s account of Ames’s salesmanship is revealing. The Philadelphia Republican remembered running into Ames at the corner of Fourteenth and F Streets as they waited for a trolley bus to the Capitol. Kelley had recently been linked in the press to another finance scheme, and Ames gently tweaked him about it.

“We fell into conversation,” Kelley remembered, “he congratulated me upon having become rich enough to have a thousand dollars to waste.”

Kelley said he told Ames that, in fact, his finances were “not then in the most flourishing condition.” Ames made an ingenious offer: Kelley could take ten Credit Mobilier shares at not cost with the understanding that he would pay the face value out of dividends and sales proceeds. “I said to him that I did not see how I could lose anything by that operation.” Kelley insisted the deal fell through, but congressional investigators determined he bought the stock made $329.

Ames reached a similar deal with Garfield, who also initially denied buying the stock.

Rep. Henry Dawes of Massachusetts got involved with Ames after discovering he had an unexpected balance in his House checking account. A colleague recommended he approach Ames about buying some railroad stock, but the King of Spades suggested Credit Mobilier as a better option. Dawes ultimately paid $1,041 for his shares, congressional investigators concluded.

Perhaps no one demonstrated Ames’s ability as a salesman quite as dramatically as Rep. John Bingham of Ohio. Bingham had good reason not to trust the Massachusetts lawmaker- in 1866 he put $2,000 into the stock of a mining company touted in which Ames served as president and lost every penny.

But when Ames approached him about Credit Mobilier, Bingham eagerly bought in.

“In December 1867 Mr. Ames advised me to invest in stock of the Credit Mobilier, assuring me it would return me my money with profitable dividends,” Bingham told the Poland committee. Bingham agreed to invest $2,000 in Credit Mobilier.

Ames was known as a man of few words. He made no speeches of record during his years in the House and preferred to operate behind the scenes. The testimony to the Poland committee indicates that he was very persuasive in that domain.

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Henry S. McComb. McComb Railroad Museum.

But, fatally for Ames, one person was not convinced. McComb, his fellow Credit Mobilier investor, felt he was entitled to additional shares as part of an agreement among Credit Mobilier stockholders in 1867 that ended a corporate feud between Ames and Thomas C. Durant.

Ames wrote three letters (one of which is quoted in part above) to McComb explaining why he had no more shares to provide. McComb was not mollified and filed suit against Ames in November, 1868. In September 1872 the New York Sun detailed the lawsuit in the explosive scoop that produced the biggest scandal of the Gilded Age.

Books by Robert B. Mitchell are available at amazon.com

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Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age.

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Skirmisher: The Life, Times and Political Career of James B. Weaver.

From the vault: American Talleyrand

One of the most interesting characters I have encountered in writing about 19th century politics is Adlai E. Stevenson, patriarch of the distinguished Illinois political family.

Ten years ago I wrote a series of posts for another blog about the personalities who played a role in James B.Weaver’s ultimately successful effort to get the House to vote on resolutions endorsing the monetary policies of the Green back-Labor Party.

Stevenson was among those who supported the third party: http://greasedpig.blogspot.com/2009/04/american-talleyrand.html?m=1

The story that started it all

By the standards of modern journalism, it was a most peculiar scoop.

Consistent with the editorial practices of the day, there was no byline. The most sensational evidence lay buried at the end. Factual errors abounded. It expressed the hope that the public figures named in the story were innocent of wrongdoing but concluded with mock regret that “there is no escaping the fact that they are guilty.”

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The headlines atop The New York Sun’s Credit Mobilier expose. Library of Congress/Chronicling America.

The Credit Mobilier scandal burst on the scene on Sept. 4, 1872, in a sprawling story that filled much of the four-page broadsheet in which it was published, the New York Sun. Charles A. Dana’s newspaper published its exclusive, reported by Washington correspondent Albert M. Gibson, under the headline “The King of Frauds.”

The headline was an apparent play on the nickname of the congressman at the center of the scandal, Republican Rep. Oakes Ames of Massachusetts, who was known as the “King of Spades” because of his family’s shovel-making business. But there was nothing funny about what it alleged.

The Sun charged that Ames sold shares in a railroad construction company known as Credit Mobilier to Republican members of Congress with the expectation that they would look out for the interests of the company’s sole customer, the Union Pacific Railroad. “We want more friends in this Congress,” Ames explained to a fellow Credit Mobilier investor, Henry S. McComb.

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Rep. Oakes Ames. Drawing in Behind the Scenes in Washington.

Ames was heavily invested in Credit Mobilier and the Union Pacific. He may well have been a shrewd railroad financier but discretion was not his strong suit. He made the assertion in one of several letters to McComb as he attempted to forestall McComb’s campaign to get additional shares of Credit Mobilier — shares he claimed he was entitled to as part of the settlement of a dispute between Ames and Thomas C. Durant in 1867.

McComb eventually sued Ames and Credit Mobilier and retained high-powered Washington attorney Jeremiah S. Black as his counsel. Unfortunately for Ames, the letter became part of the trial evidence.

And that is how the scandal that opened the Gilded Age came to light.

Black was a Democrat from Pennsylvania who had served before the Civil War as attorney general and secretary of state in the Buchanan administration. After the war he practiced law in Washington and counted friends on both sides of the aisle in Congress, including Republican Rep. James A. Garfield, a fellow member of the Campbellite Christian denomination.

In the spring and summer of 1872, McComb was deposed about the claims and submitted the letters written by Ames into his testimony. There the matter might have stayed had it not been for a serendipitous sighting that aroused Gibson’s reportorial instinct.

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Jeremiah Sullivan Black. Library of Congress.

In 1885, writing (again, without a byline) in the New York Times, Gibson — a Pennsylvania native with strong connections to the state’s Democratic establishment — recalled that he was visiting Black’s son, Chauncey, In York, Pa., when he noticed the arrival of McComb. Gibson, who had heard rumors of scandal involving Credit Mobilier and knew that McComb had filed a lawsuit on the matter, put two and two together.

With some digging in Philadelphia, where the lawsuit was filed, and — despite the correspondent’s claims to the contrary, a little help from Jeremiah Black — Gibson located the deposition. “To say I was startled at my ‘find’ would inadequately express my mental state,” Gibson wrote.

No wonder. It was all there — McComb’s detailed description of the internal operations of Credit Mobilier; his allegations that he had been defrauded by company management; and, most explosively, evidence that the company was buying friends and influence in Congress through Ames.

Unfortunately for the reader, neither Gibson nor the Sun made any attempt to synthesize or boil down the lengthy transcript. It was simply printed as it was taken down. The Sun added a sub-head here and there and fueled reader indignation with inflammatory deck heads (“Colossal Bribery” and “Congressmen Who Have Robbed the People and Now Support the National Robber,” for example) but otherwise left it to the reader to puzzle things out.

There was a halfhearted attempt at even-handedness — McComb was identified as a speculator who was “an active manipulator of both” the Union Pacific and Credit Mobilier “who made piles of money.” The real villain of the story was Ames — the target of McComb’s lawsuit. But the transcript didn’t mention Ames’s letter until the end.

Chronological order, rather than the inverted pyramid, was the Sun’s favored approach to news, according to historian Janet Steele’s account of the newspaper, It Shines for All. In the case of Credit Mobilier, that didn’t help the reader one bit.

Numerous sloppy errors were also unhelpful. The Sun, in boldface at the top of the story, said lawmakers 2,000 to 3,000 shares apiece. In fact, no one bought more than 150 shares – and that lawmaker, James Brooks of New York, obtained his shares from Thomas C. Durant.

The mistakes hurt, allowing one newspaper in Maine to dismiss the story as the “Credit Mobilier slanders.” The Sun‘s well-earned reputation as an ardent foe of President Ulysses S. Grant made matters worse. The story’s appearance in the Sun is “prima facie evidence that it is a lie,” the New York Times sneered.

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Difficult to read, riddled with errors and published by a rabidly anti-Grant newspaper, the Credit Mobilier expose could easily have been dismissed. Why did it resonate?

The story confirmed what many in the press already knew – that Credit Mobilier stock was being used to buy influence on Capitol Hill. As early as 1868, John R. Young, the managing editor of the New York Tribune, warned Rep. Elihu Washburne, R-Ill., of testimony in New York courts pointing to “an almost incredible amount of corruption” involving the Union Pacific and “especially the Credit Mobilier.” Young, a good Republican, feared that the evidence would hurt his party’s chances in the presidential election of that year and assured Washburne he would do what he could to keep it out of the press. “This is the only thing that makes me hesitate, and I do not know as that will long.

Four years later, the Tribune published a condensed version of the Sun’s story. Even though it seemed to help Tribune editor and Democratic presidential candidate Horace Greeley, the newspaper said it was hesitant to do so except for one thing: “our knowledge of the fact that the letters of Mr. Ames are genuine documents.”

Then the Tribune went on to make a prediction that three congressional investigations, front-page headlines and searing editorial in newspapers from Sacramento to New York would validate in the months to come. “The public will look with deep interest at further developments in the case.”

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Read more about the Credit Mobilier scandal in Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age, available Amazon.com

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The salary grab

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Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper displays the congressional finger-pointing that followed passage of what became known as the “salary grab.” Representative Ben Butler (from left) was the chief advocate of the increase. Library of Congress image.

By the end of February 1873, the last gusts of the Credit Mobilier scandal had ceased. Another storm quickly followed.

As an incredulous press and public looked on, the House slapped Oakes Ames and James Brooks on the wrists for their roles in the scandal that dominated the Capitol and the headlines for months since it was first reported in the New York Sun. The Senate, faced with a similar quandary involving one of its own, Sen. James Patterson of New Hampshire, did nothing at all.

After concluding that no one should be expelled over the Credit Mobilier scandal, Congress decided it needed a pay raise.

In one of the last acts of the Forty-Second Congress, lawmakers approved legislation that raised salaries for themselves, the president, Supreme Court justices, Cabinet officers and other top federal officials.

For members of Congress, the pay increase was significant – a 50 percent rise from $5,000 to $7,500 annually. Expressed in terms of 2016 purchasing power, that would be a pay raise taking one’s salary from $103,000 to $155,000. Moreover, the pay raise was retroactive to the beginning of the Forty Second Congress.

The measure was the brainchild of Representative Ben Butler of Massachusetts, the wily and controversial Radical Republican who defended Ames during the Credit Mobilier expulsion debate. After failing to win support for the measure, Butler managed to attach it to a legislative appropriations bill coming up for a vote at the end of the session.

Proponents of the pay increase justified it on the grounds of egalitarianism. Without the pay increase, argued Sen. Thomas Weston Tipton, R-Neb., it would be impossible for “a poor mechanic, a poor businessman, a poor lawyer” to serve in Congress, leaving the job of legislation to the “moneyed aristocracy.”

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Rep. Ben Butler. Library of Congress.

There may well have been merit to Tipton’s argument, but the pay increase – coming on the heels of Credit Mobilier — was a stunning political miscalculation. Sen. Aaron Harrison Craigin made that abundantly clear.

On the Senate floor, the New Hampshire Republican waved a telegram he had received from his allies in Manchester that warned “We are beaten forever if the bill passes.” But the reaction would not be confined to his state, he added. Passage of the salary bill endangered Republican prospects in upcoming elections in Connecticut and Rhode Island, he noted. “I begin to believe that [members of] this Congress will never learn wisdom until the people shall teach them.”

Indeed, the reaction was swift and stern. The New York Times called it “plunder” and connected the pay increase – which was widely becoming known as the “salary grab” – with congressional failure to take meaningful action on Credit Mobilier.

Like Craigin, the Times predicted voter wrath would soon make itself apparent.

“The public will not readily forget a piece of rascality so shameless, so despicable, and so conspicuous. Following close on the scandal of the Credit Mobilier – a scandal arising largely from the moral cowardice of Congress in treating it – it has wrought a deep impression on the people, which will make itself felt sooner or later – and we are inclined to think it will be sooner rather than later.”

Representative James A. Garfield of Ohio was particularly vulnerable as one of the lawmakers implicated in the Credit Mobilier scandal and the manager of the appropriations bill to which the salary increase was attached. With voters up in arms, Garfield refunded his salary increase to the Treasury – and his allies made sure the local press knew about it.

In the spring and early summer of 1873, as 16 states prepared for local elections, voter fury over the pay hike was reflected in state Republican platforms. In Ohio, Iowa, and other states, the party denounced the pay increase, abuses by railroads and Credit Mobilier.

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James A. Garfield. Library of Congress.

“The Salary Grab – It Is Indefensible and Will Be Punished,” the New York Herald warned in August. “Public indignation has been so thoroughly aroused,” James Gordon Bennett Jr.’s paper warned, “that few politicians will be able to remain in public life unless they have returned the amount into the Treasury and are at the same time recorded as against the measure.”

By the time the Forty-Third Congress convened in December, the salary increase was doomed. Dozens of bills called for its repeal. Republican Representative Moses W. Field of Michigan, tongue planted firmly in cheek, proposed that lawmakers serve without salary or mileage compensation.

Field and his colleagues understood they had to act decisively to repeal the salary increase. The new Congress not only faced voter fury over Credit Mobilier and the salary grab, it also had to cope with the consequences of a severe stock-market panic that threatened widespread unemployment and bankruptcy.

Well might the National Republican newspaper in Washington counsel vigorous action by Congress to address escalating anger with the political status quo. The state elections were difficult for Republicans in Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa and elsewhere – and a possible foretaste of things to come. “The ‘off-year’ and its results has made many a Congressman feel the possibility, if not the probability, of his early retirement to public life,” the newspaper warned.

Buy a copy of Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age at amazon.com

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Harnessing “the priceless boon” of community

One of my favorite scenes in The Searchers involves a moment that seems almost unimaginable today.

The arrival of Texas Ranger Charlie McCorry at the Jorgensen homestead in west Texas is treated in the classic 1956 John Ford film as a great occasion – because he brought a letter.

Lars Jorgensen hovers over his daughter as she reads. He plucks the missive from the fire after she angrily wads it up and hurls it into the flames. A letter – the second of the year, Jorgensen marvels – was too precious to simply discard.

Part of Ford’s genius was his gift for illuminating aspects of daily life in the 19th-century American west. Perhaps no feature of existence from that century is harder to imagine in our digitized world than the extreme loneliness endured by families eking out a new existence on farms and ranches throughout the country.

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Grange recruiting poster. Library of Congress.

When the family of James B. Weaver left its homestead in southern Iowa in the 1840s and settled in what would become the county seat town of Bloomfield, the gregarious Iowan rejoiced. It was a “priceless boon” to have the chance to visit neighbors and talk to them, Weaver recalled. “Our home life was more varied as we met our neighbors with greater frequency.”

Isolation was psychologically devastating. Defeating it would yield significant rewards.

Among the first to understand this were Methodist preachers who convened summer camp meeting at which families would stay for days to worship, sing and celebrate with their neighbors. The first camp meeting was probably held in Logan County, Ky., in 1800, according to a blog post for the United Methodist Church by Joe Iovino. In the decades that followed, camp meetings were held across the Old Northwest and in the territories – such as Iowa – across the Mississippi.

“In them,” according to an entry in the Encyclopedia of World Methodism, “multitudes were converted.”

In Davis County, Iowa, Cumberland Presbyterians (the denomination that would claim William Jennings Bryan as one of its own) held camp meetings, but the Methodists pioneered the event, according to Henry C. Ethell’s history of the county’s early days. “Cloth tents or board houses were ranged round a large square, seated with slabs or thick planks. Families living several miles away came and lived in these tents throughout the meeting. A Sunday congregation would often number three of four thousand,” Ethell wrote.

The grandson of an Iowa Methodist, the Rev. Francis Carey, offered an account of how camp meetings worked in the Pioneer History of Davis County. The meeting included the famous Iowa Methodist pastor Henry Clay Dean, who preached two sermons – the first failing to move his listeners. But the second did not disappoint. “The people were completely overcome,” Carey’s grandson wrote, “and many in the multitude, weeping and sobbing, embraced the church that evening.”

Weaver fondly remembered the visits of circuit-riding Methodist pastors who stopped at isolated farms to minister to families who could not attend church.

Through these forms of evangelism, the Methodists gained a foothold on the frontier that would help make the denomination one of the most influential in the United States in the 19th century.

In the years after the Civil War, a secular group formed to overcome the isolation of the farmstead rose to power and prominence. The Patrons of Husbandry, widely known as “the Grange,” spread like wildfire across the Old Northwest and the Upper South.

Its purpose was, in theory, apolitical. The founders of the Grange envisioned a secret society much like the Masons in which elaborate ritual played a central role. “Although the original idea of the founders appears to have been that the benefits of the order to its members would be primarily social and intellectual, it very soon became apparent that the desire for financial advantages would prove a far greater incentive for the farmers to join,” Solon Justus Buck wrote in his history of the Grange.

Buck writes that Granger efforts were initially directed at cooperative schemes aimed at lowering production costs for members – buying supplies and insurance – and maximizing profits on commodity sales. Another concern soon converted the Grange from an apolitical society for farmers into a potent force in American politics.

Growing discontent with railroad business practices and political clout alarmed farmers who saw the promises of access to distant markets for their products evaporate due to high – and often seemingly arbitrary – freight rates. Attempts in state legislatures to address this issue by regulating rates began as early as the late 1850s but went nowhere. The Grange offered a means for farmers to organize themselves politically to press their case for railroad regulation.

Washington took notice as Grange lodges proliferated across the Old Northwest. “The movement of the western people against the great railroad monopolies begins to assume definite shape,” the Washington Evening Star noted in its editorial column on Feb. 20, 1873. The newspaper predicted that “it is pretty certain that the control of railroad fares and freight will be the issue on which the next legislatures of several of the western states will be chosen.”

Anti-railroad sentiment did indeed emerge as a prominent issue in the off-year elections of 1873. State Republican platforms throughout the Old Northwest called for “cheap transportation” and denounced railroad business practices. Anti-Monopoly candidates swept to victory in Iowa and elsewhere. Granger William R. Taylor defeated Republican Gov. C.C. Washburn in his bid for re-election despite Washburn’s record as a critic of railroad business practices.

In the late 1880s, another farmer’s movement followed the trail blazed by the Grangers. The National Farmers Alliance & Industrial Union advocated an explicitly political program that called for, among other things, government control of the railroads, Robert C. McMath Jr. writes in his history of populism. Like the Grangers, the Alliance featured its own passwords and rituals, McMath notes – including burial services.

The movement spread across the Plains and the South with rallies that McMath likened to camp meetings. In 1892, it morphed into a political party – the People’s Party, commonly referred to today as the Populists – with Weaver at its head. Weaver carried four states in that year, running against Grover Cleveland and President Benjamin Harrison.

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James B. Weaver and his running mater, J.G. Fields. Library of Congress/Chronicling America.

The conversion from social organization to political party, however, did not end well. In 1896, Populists put Democratic presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan at the top of their ticket – a move backed by pragmatists like Weaver but which spelled the end of the party as an effective third force in American politics. Weaver, who had broken with the Republicans in 1877 and spent the next two decades in the ranks of the Greenback-Labor and Populist parties – eventually joined the Democrats.

Nevertheless, the populist movement enjoyed its moment in the sun in large part because it brought farmers together to work for a common goal. It merged politics and social engagement and tapped into what historian Joseph F. Wall identified as the farmer’s delight in meeting with others. “He is an individualist who enjoys working in the fields alone, but he also craves company,” Wall wrote of the prototypical farmer in his bicentennial history of Iowa. “Most farm organizations from the National Grange to the Farm Bureau were initially inspired by the farmer’s desire for some king of social communication and an opportunity for an interchange of new ideas.”

Lars Jorgensen would have appreciated that.

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Books by Robert B. Mitchell are available at amazon.com

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Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age.

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Skirmisher: The Life, Times and Political Career of James B. Weaver

 

The purge of Schuyler Colfax

It seemed like a dream ticket in 1868.

Republicans made the conquering hero of the Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant, their presidential nominee in a campaign aimed at putting the party back in control of post-war Reconstruction.

If Grant was the natural choice to lead Republicans, his vice-presidential running mate seemed almost as ideal. Becoming Speaker of the House in 1863, Schuyler Colfax of Indiana presided through the tumultuous final years of the Civil War and early stages of Reconstruction. He was Speaker when the House passed the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery. Well-liked if not terribly well- respected (his nickname, “Smiler,” connoted an amiable back-slapper rather than a serious statesman) and hailing from a battleground state where Democratic sympathies ran strong, Colfax’s presence on the ticket made a great deal of sense.

Four years later, however, he was out. Republicans kicked him off the ticket in favor of Sen. Henry Wilson of Massachusetts.

What happened?

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The Grant-Colfax ticket in 1868. Wikimedia Commons.

A common but erroneous explanation is that the party booted Colfax because of his involvement in the Credit Mobilier scandal. While Speaker, Colfax arranged to buy shares in the oddly named, lucrative Union Pacific construction subsidiary from Rep. Oakes Ames of Massachusetts. Colfax numbered among 11 members of the Congress to whom Ames sold shares in the winter of 1867-1868.

The transactions would indeed become an enormous political liability – but not until Sept. 4, when the New York Sun published its explosive scoop detailing the operations of Credit Mobilier. and Ames’s stock sales to his colleagues. The Republicans met in Philadephia June 5-6 — three months before the expose by the Sun that implicated Colfax.

The explanation for Colfax’s ouster has more to do with the internal machinations of Republican politics than the scandal that opened the Gilded Age.

In early September 1871, Colfax arranged for the publication of a letter in which he announced his intention to retire from public life. On Sept. 10 he elaborated on his thinking to voters in his home town of South Bend. “I intend that the present term shall close my connection with public office and public duties,” Colfax said, according to a biography written by Ovando James Hollister.

As so often happened with Colfax, his statement backfired. Few took it at face value; many wondered what he was really up to. “What does it mean?” The New York Herald asked on Sept. 8. The Herald speculated that he was positioning himself to seek the Republican presidential nomination in 1876. “He certainly cannot stand for the presidency in the next term. Grant leaves no opportunity.”

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Schuyler Colfax. Library of Congress.

But that view was not universally held. Discontent with Grant simmered in some Republican quarters. “Republican defection was a new thing,” Hollister wrote. Horace Greeley and Sen. Charles Sumner, R-Mass., were unhappy with Grant and they “had the respect and confidence of Republicans to an extraordinary degree.” Other Republican journals followed Greeley’s lead in voicing dissatisfaction with Grant over Reconstruction and the specter of corruption.

Wavering support for Grant in Republican ranks raised the prospect that he might be defeated in 1872, according to Hollister. “A slight defection in the voters would lose the great Central States, and with them, the battle,” Hollister wrote. “This gave character to the demand that Colfax should become a candidate against Grant.” In retrospect, it is clear that this fear was wildly exaggerated.

In any event, Colfax, finding himself in the awkward position of denying any intention to challenge or embarrass Grant, walked back his plan to retire from public life. According to Hollister, Colfax in March, 1872 indicated he would accept renomination for vice president if the convention offered it.

But Samuel Bowles, the Liberal editor of the Springfield Republican, warned Colfax that Republican party leaders wanted him gone. “I find a growing conviction that the people who are running the ‘machine’ mean to slaughter you in Philadelphia,” Bowles wrote in an April 5 letter quoted by Hollister.

When Republicans gathered in Philadelphia, they renominated Grant as a matter of course. The vice-presidential nomination was another matter.

Sen. Henry Wilson, a reliable radical Republican, emerged as Colfax’s chief rival for the nomination as Republicans gathered in the birthplace of American independence. “The city to-night presents a most enlivening spectacle,” according to a June 4 dispatch published in the Chicago Tribune. “The excitement on the Vice Presidency, which continues as the only real question of interest, has remained undiminished throughout the evening.”

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Sen. Henry Wilson, R-Mass., Schuyler Colfax’s success as vice president. Library of Congress.

As the balloting proceeded in Philadelphia, Colfax and Wilson were in Washington with the Senate in session. Colfax left the Senate floor to receive updates in his Senate office while Wilson received telegrams — many of which he perused “with considerable emotion” — throughout the day on the Senate floor, according to the Washington Evening Star. “At a few minutes before 4 o’clock he received the announcement of his nomination on the first ballot, and in a few minutes Mr. Colfax came in, and offered his hand to Mr. Wilson in cordial congratulation,” the newspaper reported.

Bowles’s sources, as turned out, were good. The tally in the Evening Star told the story: Wilson, with substantial support from Southern delegates and New England along with strong showings in Ohio, Illinois, and Iowa, topped Colfax by 43 votes.

It was the beginning of an “annus horribilis” for Colfax. Over the course of the next 12 months, he lost his mother to old age, his reputation to the Credit Mobilier scandal and a chance to edit the New York Tribune to Whitelaw Reid following the death of Greeley. Ironically, one of those tarred by the Credit Mobilier scandal was Henry Wilson, Colfax’s successor.

On March 4, 1873, as Grant took office for his second term, Colfax delivered a valedictory address in which he defended his record in public life and denied wrongdoing. Grace Greenwood of the New York Times noted that Colfax looked “pale, careworn and sad” as he delivered his farewell.

No wonder.

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Read more about Schuyler Colfax and the Credit Mobilier scandal in Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age. Available at amazon.com.

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The vigil of 1881

The nation kept an anxious eye on the White House in the summer of 1881.

On July 2, President James A. Garfield headed to the Baltimore and Potomac train station, located at 6th and what is now Constitution Avenue. He was planning to embark on a much-needed vacation sojourn through New England after the conclusion of a bruising patronage battle with Sen. Roscoe Conkling of New York.

Charles Guiteau – a delusional figure swept up by the partisan politics of the day – was waiting. As the president stood on the platform, Guiteau opened fire and hit Garfield. Guiteau believed that shooting the president would somehow unite the Republican Party and restore its “Stalwart” faction to dominance.

Kenneth D. Ackerman’s vivid account of the moments that followed the shooting paints a portrait of chaos and miscalculation. Blood and vomit covered the floor where Garfield lay. Secretary of State James G. Blaine, who had accompanied Garfield to the train station, started to chase after Guiteau before realizing the president had been wounded. Blaine stayed by his side as screaming onlookers demanded the lynching of Guiteau.

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The assassination of President James A. Garfield, July 2, 1881. From Perley’s Reminiscences.

Doctors roused the fading Garfield with smelling salts, offered the president brandy and examined the wounds. One physician, Ackerman writes, assured Garfield that he would recover. After an hour, the president was taken back to the White House.

And so began the vigil. Over the course of the next two months, the nation’s newspapers kept close track of Garfield’s condition. Disinformation abounded. The press slavishly printed official bulletins and parroted the White House line that the president was on the road to recovery, even though there were numerous hints in the daily coverage that optimism was not warranted.

On Aug. 1, the Sacramento Daily Record-Union offered an encouraging dispatch. Dr. Silas Boynton, the newspaper reported, “says the President is decidedly better.” Surgeons caring for Garfield noted his excellent spirits. “The President’s recovery” the paper reported, “is now considered only a question of time.”

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James A. Garfield. Library of Congress.

One day later, the New York Tribune amplified on the theme. Dr. F.H. Hamilton predicted Garfield “looks as if he would be able within a week or two to give some attention to his executive duties.”

But the Tribune also pointed out that physicians were still – one month after the shooting – unable to extract the bullet lodged in Garfield. Alexander Graham Bell tried to locate it with a piece of electrical equipment known as an “induction balance.” The inventor of the telephone issued a statement in which he conceded that while he had a general idea where the projectile was, “the depth at which the bullet lies beneath the surface cannot be determined from our experiments.”

A week later it was clear — inside the White House — that Garfield was not improving, and doctors operated Aug. 8. Despite his worsening condition, another stream of reassuring bulletins followed. “There is continued confidence felt by all about the President tonight,” the Chicago Tribune reported in a dispatch datelined Aug. 9.

While the Tribune and other newspapers maintained a chipper approach to Garfield’s condition, at least one sensed that something was amiss. The Springfield Republican suggested that the profusion of double-talk that filled official statements said more about the self-importance of the doctors than the condition of the president.

“When the President is worse along towards night, his case shows ‘nocturnal exacerbation;’ when the doctor sticks his finger in the wound he practices ‘digital manipulation,’ which has a highly dangerous sound. Gen. Garfield is no longer affected by the weather, but by ‘atmospheric’ or ‘telluric’ causes. … We can tolerate as much of this lingo as seems to add to the precision and exactitude of the statement, but beyond that it is well to regard it as partaking of professional affectation.”

As the month dragged on, it was becoming increasingly difficult for the press to ignore the ominous signs. On Aug. 20, the Washington Evening Critic proclaimed in headlines that there were “No Indications of a Relapse” and noted the “Hopeful Views of the Doctors.” One of the attending physicians assured the newspaper — “with a smile” — that “There is no trouble with his stomach.”

But the Evening Critic was not quite as credulous as the doctor seemed to believe. Although it stuck to the official line that Garfield was improving, it also noted the roller-coaster nature of his convalescence. “The President was stricken down exactly forty-nine days ago, and has suffered untold agonies during that period. Several relapses have occurred, each severer than the last and each throwing the country into the depths of despair that the President was to be taken away.”

A week later, despair swept the country. On Aug. 27 the Sacramento Union published the daily medical statement but followed up with a report on the mood of the Cabinet. “The members of the Cabinet left the White House in a dreary, slow, sad way, as if the end expected by every one had already arrived.” Blaine left with his hat pulled over his eyes while his wife “was leaning on his arm. She was in tears.”

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The Morris Daily Tribune, Morris, Minn. Library of Congress/Chronicling America.

In Minnesota, the Morris Tribune published an extra on Aug. 27 notable for its stark layout and grim headlines. “At Death’s Door!” “President Garfield’s Hours Numbered!” “All Hope is Dead!”

The Minnesota newspaper may have been a bit premature — Garfield biographer Allan Peskin notes that the president briefly rallied in late August — but the trend was clear. On Sept. 6, Garfield was transferred to a home along the New Jersey shore. He died in Long Branch, N.J., on Sept. 19.

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The scene at Garfield’s death bed, from Perley’s Reminiscences.

Historians in recent years have been harshly critical of the care received by the president and argue that bungling doctors did as much to kill Garfield as Guiteau. While the president’s physicians failed their patient, the nation’s newspapers failed the public by uncritically accepting official pronouncements. A 19th-century reader had to puzzle out clues as to the true state of affairs. It would be decades before the nation’s newspapers could summon the reportorial skill and sophistication necessary to adequately cover a health emergency involving the president.

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Garfield figures prominently in the Credit Mobilier scandal. Read about him and other Gilded Age figures in my two books, both available at amazon.com

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Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age.

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Skirmisher: The Life, Times, and Political Career of James B. Weaver

From the vault: Thomas Nast and James B. Weaver

James B. Weaver, the Iowa populist and subject of my first book, drew scorn from many quarters. Perhaps no one was more effective at skewering Weaver — and getting under his skin — than Thomas Nast.

http://greasedpig.blogspot.com/2009/03/gross-and-uncomplimentary-exaggerations.html

Jefferson’s “Mammoth Cheese”

I took a break from the late 19th century to write about the early 19th century for The Washington Post’s Retropolis blog:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/07/13/an-edible-token-esteem-pound-cheese-given-thomas-jefferson/

From the vault: John M. Palmer, Gold Bug Democrat

The campaign of 1896 was not just Bryan v. McKinley. From another blog, my profile of Illinois Democrat John M. Palmer. http://greasedpig.blogspot.com/2008/10/going-for-gold.html?m=1