In a series of remarkable pen pictures the governor brought charges of dishonesty against most of the custom-house reformers—against Senators Ray, Casey, Packard, Lowell,[368] Carter.[369] His attack on Carter may be considered typical:
Mr. Carter was also, and is now, the paid attorney of the New Orleans, Mobile, and Texas Railroad Company, from which he receives $833.33 per month, or $10,000 per annum, and for which he has never done one hour’s service. The contract for his employment was made with him by the company after he had kept in his pocket for thirty or sixty days a bill which had passed the legislature almost unanimously, and immediately after this contract was made, by which he became the attorney of the company, the bill was signed by him.[370]
Several of the men attempted no reply to these charges, and Carter’s explanation served only to convince the Congressional committee that the charge was substantially true.[371] Casey was clearly proved to have been the holder of a corruption fund of $18,000, part of a $50,000 fund raised by himself and others to bribe the legislature to pass a bill for a company in which he was an interested incorporator. When the governor vetoed the bill, Casey unlocked the safe and Herring returned $18,000. It required just eighteen senators to pass the bill.[372] The president of the Louisiana Lottery Company had a list of about fifty members of the House with whom he had made arrangements for the passage of the Jackson Railroad bill with the amount that had been paid and the sum still due. The amount with a few exceptions was $600, but Campbell and Pinchback were rated worth $2000.[373] Many members held two offices, quite content to interpret the constitution in the Louisiana way that a member of the Assembly was not a State officer.[374]
The governor made a genuine effort to combat the extravagance of the legislature. In April, 1871, soon after the adjournment of the Assembly, he applied to the courts for an injunction to restrain the auditor from paying warrants for the mileage, per diem, and contingent expenses of members of the lower house, because fraudulent vouchers had been issued whereby the amounts had been increased. The injunction was granted and the auditor, together with several experts, appointed to investigate the matter. The governor’s real object was to assail Speaker Carter by the allegation that he had coerced the chief clerk to sign a fraudulent journal of the House, which authorized five committees to sit during the recess, thus defrauding the State of $200,000. Warmoth declared that a number of resolutions, which the speaker stated as introduced and passed the last night, had been interpolated into the journal, for it was notorious that they had not been introduced up to half-past eight o’clock that evening, and that from that moment until the adjournment the House had been in a constant state of uproar, during which time it was impossible for the House to take any action. He advanced what seems considerable evidence of his charge, while the delay of the publication of this day’s journal for sixteen days after the adjournment,[375] looks, it will be confessed, suspicious.[376]
The report of the commission sustained the charges of the governor but in part. It was shown that the amount of the warrants had in some instances been fraudulently increased; that warrants to the amount of $240,000 had been issued in excess of the appropriation of 1871[377]; that many warrants for extra pay to officers and clerks had been issued on the resolution of but one house, contrary to law; that $40,000 had been fraudulently issued to committees for mileage on official duty, when, according to the journals, they had not left the city; and that the signatures of the State officers had been forged in various instances. The commission condemned the loose manner of conducting business in the warrant office, but brought no specific charges. The opposition press charged the governor with holding up this report for months and publishing it at the opportune moment for him—just before the assembling of the legislature in 1872.[378]
An important decision in regard to the limitation of the State debt was rendered in May by the State Supreme Court. The matter came up on appeal from the Eighth District Court of New Orleans, where a suit had been instituted to compel the auditor to issue a warrant on an appropriation of $50,000 made in favor of a Mr. Nixon. The auditor had refused because the law authorizing it violated the recent amendment, as it increased the debt above the constitutional limit. The Supreme Court affirmed the decision of the lower court in favor of the auditor, contending that “the evidence in the record leaves no doubt that the debt of the State exceeded twenty-five million dollars on or before the first of March, 1871.”[379]
FOOTNOTES:
[282] Jan. 15, 1870. “Whereas different persons and separate organizations are contending for recognition as the Central Republican Club of the State of Louisiana.... Resolved That the organization thus attempted be permitted to take a back seat in the gatherings of the great Republican party of this state, and that the door of the Republican Temple shall hereafter, like gospel gates, stand open night and day, until all political sinners, including even the erring ones from the New Orleans Customhouse, shall have time and opportunity to return decently and in order to their father’s house.” La. House Jour., 55.
[283] See above p. 29. House Journ., 1870, 252.
[284] Warmoth himself thought that “if it had not been for that amendment there would have been no division.” House Misc. Doc., 42 Cong., 2 Sess., No. 211, 380. Dibble, however, thought that opposition began when he refused to sign the civil rights bill of 1868. Ibid., 298.