THE CORRUPTION OF OFFICIALS.
To get these subsidies, in conjunction with the "postages," the steamship owners by one means or another corrupted postal officials and members of Congress. "I have noticed," said Senator Toombs, in a speech in the United States Senate on June 9, 1858, that there has never been a head of a Department strong enough to resist steamship contracts. I have noticed them here with your Whig party and your Democratic party for the last thirteen years, and I have never seen any head of a Department strong enough to resist these influences. … Thirteen years' experience has taught me that wherever you allow the Postoffice or Navy Department to do anything which is for the benefit of contractors you may consider the thing as done. I could point to more than a dozen of these contracts. … A million dollars a year is a power that will be felt. For ten years it amounts to ten million dollars, and I know it is felt. I know it perverts legislation. I have seen its influence; I have seen the public treasury plundered by it. … [Footnote: The Congressional Globe, First Session, Thirty-fifth Congress, 1857-58, iii: 2839.]
By means of this systematic corruption the steamship owners received many millions of dollars of Government funds. This was all virtually plunder; the returns from the "postages" far more than paid them for the transportation of mails. And what became of these millions in loot? Part went in profits to the owners, and another part was used as private capital by them to build more and newer ships constantly. Practically none of Vanderbilt's ships cost him a cent; the Government funds paid for their building. In fact, a careful tracing of the history of all of the subsidized steamship companies proves that this plunder from the Government was very considerably more than enough to build and equip their entire lines.
One of the subsidized steamship lines was that of E. K. Collins & Co., a line running from New York to Liverpool. Collins debauched the postal officials and Congress so effectively that in 1847 he obtained an appropriation of $387,000 a year, and subsequently an additional appropriation of $475,000 for five years. Together with the "postages," these amounts made a total mail subsidy for that one line alone during the latter years of the contract of about a million dollars a year. The act of Congress did not, however, specify that the contract was to run for ten years. The postal officials, by what Senator Toombs termed "a fraudulent construction," declared that it did run for ten years from 1850, and made payments accordingly. The bill before Congress in the closing days of the session of 1858, was the usual annual authorization of the payment of this appropriation, as well as other mail-steamer appropriations.