A locus of power and influence

Much of the drama surrounding the Credit Mobilier scandal occurred in the chambers and hearing rooms of the U.S. Capitol or unfolded in the pages of the nation’s increasingly muscular daily newspapers.

But some of the scandal’s more interesting episodes and meetings took place about 15 blocks west of the Capitol amid the hotels and newspaper offices that sprung up in the vicinity of the White House and Lafayette Square.

[image error] The Willard, from Washington Outside and Inside, by George Alfred Townsend.

For one congressman, it all started at the corner of 14th and F Streets.

“Pig Iron” Kelley, a Pennsylvania Republican to whom Oakes Ames sold Credit Mobilier shares, recalled bumping into his colleague from Massachusetts at the intersection during the winter of 1867-1868 while waiting for a streetcar. It was there, Kelley said, that Ames, known as the “King of Spades” because of his family’s shovel-making business, first broached the subject of investing in Credit Mobilier.

The location is interesting because it was a locus of power, wealth and influence in the nation’s capital. Much of the city’s most important business was transacted in the neighborhood. Two of Washington’s most prominent hotels – the Willard and the Ebbitt House – were located nearby. A third hotel, the Arlington, looked over Lafayette Square from the spot where the Department of Veterans Affairs is now located.

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The Ebbitt House, from Washington Outside and Inside, by George Alfred Townsend.

“Newspaper Row,” the warren of offices occupied by out-of-town reporters, was also in the vicinity. Kelley could not recall when he encountered Ames but remembered that they met as he emerged from the Ebbitt House or Newspaper Row.

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A young William D. “Pig Iron” Kelley. Library of Congress photo.

Newspaper Row figured prominently in the Credit Mobilier story as the location from which correspondents wrote stories and transmitted them by telegraph back to their newspapers. Upon his return to Washington in the autumn of 1872, and after learning he had been implicated in the scandal, one of the first stops James A. Garfield made was to the office of Henry Van Ness Boynton, the influential correspondent of the Cincinnati Gazette.

Several months later, when testimony by Ames undercut professions of innocence by the lawmakers with whom he had done business, Newspaper Row was a busy place. “The innocents were popping in and out of newspaper offices like jacks-in-boxes,” the New York Sun noted with amusement, referring to the congressmen. “They also had any number of friends engaged in the same service. They all wanted to be let up on, just for a day or two, until they could be heard from.”

There would be no let up.

One of the scandal’s most dramatic confrontations occurred at the Arlington. In April 1872, Ames met with Henry S. McComb, a fellow Credit Mobilier investor suing Ames to obtain more shares in the valuable company. McComb offered to drop his lawsuit and turn over incriminating evidence to Ames in exchange for the shares he wanted. Ames didn’t budge.

Four months later, as the nation was consumed by the presidential election pitting President Grant against Horace Greeley, the story of Credit Mobilier exploded in the Sun.

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Coming this fall: Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age, by Robert B. Mitchell. From Edinborough Press.