“Nature designed him for a large part in life”
With his white hair, open face, and genial bearing, Henry Simpson McComb looked and acted more like a senator than a railroad speculator. “Nature designed him for a large part in life; he is the equal of any to whom he speaks, and courteous to all,” journalist George Alfred Townsend wrote in 1872.
As with many of the other figures in the story of the Credit Mobilier scandal, though, it wasn’t that simple. Townsend would later offer another, far harsher, verdict about McComb. In 1882, Townsend noted that McComb was litigious, “jealous of money, and belligerent when deprived of his share of it.”
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Henry S. McComb. Photo courtesy of the McComb Railroad Museum, McComb, Mississippi.
Delaware-born McComb played a central role in the Credit Mobilier scandal as the aggrieved stockholder whose suit against Oakes Ames eventually found its way into the pages of the New York Sun.
In the fall of 1867, as Credit Mobilier officials put the finishing touches on a new and highly lucrative contract with the Union Pacific, the company’s directors authorized the issuance of additional shares of stock to Ames and Thomas C. Durant. McComb signed off on the distribution, but said he did so reluctantly – and immediately began to pester Oakes Ames for more stock.
Ames tried to put him off, and in the process wrote three short, damaging letters in which he said he was distributing shares on Capitol Hill “where they will do the most good.” Ames confessed to McComb that he sought to protect the interests of Credit Mobilier’s sole contractor, the Union Pacific, on Capitol Hill through the distribution of the stock.
The letters failed to calm McComb, and he kept up his campaign. At one point, he claimed, an exasperated Ames told him, “There is no stock for you. You consented to give it to me for members of Congress.” In November 1868, McComb filed suit, setting in motion the events that would lead to the scoop by the Sun, three congressional investigations, months of headlines, and a scandal that announced a new era in American politics.
There is some reason to believe that McComb was as mortified as Ames by the Sun’s exclusive. In an interview with Townsend, McComb bemoaned the many errors and exaggerations in the story. Jeremiah S. Black, McComb’s attorney, went so far to blame Ames for implicating members of Congress in the shady stock sales.
McComb’s genteel facade occasionally slipped during the course of the congressional investigations. After one witness directly challenged McComb’s truthfulness, he responded with a snarl. “Oh, I wish you were about twenty-five years younger,” McComb warned. “I would comb you down in more ways than one.”
In the years to come, McComb busied himself with railroad investments in Mississippi but could not avoid bankruptcy. His business partners viewed him with suspicion, but at his passing his suit against Credit Mobilier was remembered for helping to improve the ethical climate in Washington.
Whether that actually was the case is open to question. But the suit itself ended in failure after it was quietly dismissed in federal court in Philadelphia in 1878.
Ironically, McComb and Ames, rivals whose dispute over Credit Mobilier shares fueled one of the great political scandals of the nineteenth century, share one thing in common. There are communities today named after each – McComb, Mississippi, and Ames, Iowa.
Read more about McComb, Oakes Ames, James A. Garfield and others in Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age, coming this fall from Edinborough Press.
