“I had occasion to look into his record, and published a statement in reference to his character, in which I proved conclusively that any petit jury in any New England state would have convicted him of grand larceny upon the evidence by his own declarations,—his own letters. These charges were made by me when he was living. Every opportunity was given him to make his defense; he had no defense to make but a lie. He had been a member of McPherson’s body-guard that stopped near Mrs. Jacob Thompson’s residence in Mississippi. He was there taken sick and taken into her house and nursed and kindly treated by her. At that time and under those circumstances, he, or some one with his knowledge and connivance, stole the deeds and patents and valuable papers belonging to the Thompson estate. After the war he settled here and wrote a letter to Mrs. Thompson. In his first letter he thanked her for her kind and Christian treatment of him while he was sick, although he was an enemy to her cause, saying that he would ever hold it in remembrance. The second letter called to her mind the fact that she had lost those valuable papers, and offered to return them or have them returned to her for a consideration. She wrote him back. The correspondence was published in full. Finally, he wrote to her if she wanted these papers better than she wanted $10,000, to send him on the money and get the papers. That was about his language, written in the most abominable and illiterate style.” The matter was placed in the hands of lawyers, who induced Applegate with $300 to surrender the papers.
General James H. Clanton, under oath, spoke thus of Harrington, speaker of the house of representatives:
“Mr. Harrington came to Mobile very poor, from the northeast somewhere. He was never a soldier that we knew of. He is now very rich. Just after the war he was charged with running free negroes into Cuba. I do not know whether it is true or not. The present sheriff of Montgomery county showed me a reward offered for him, from what purported to be a northwestern paper, on a charge of bank robbery. He requested me to say nothing about it lest Harrington should get away. He said he was going for him that night; that he had his accomplice in jail, and the accomplice said Harrington was the man. The description he showed me was lifelike.”
Asked whether it could not be a mistake, the general replied:
“No, sir; a man of marked physique. I did not give this information at the time to any of my law partners, but they smiled when I told them that Harrington would pay more reward to Barbour (the sheriff) and we would never hear of it again. And we never did hear of it till we published it in the last campaign, to which Harrington, who still lives there, made no response whatever. Colonel Thomas H. Herndon, a prominent lawyer of Mobile, said to me that a friend saw Harrington, during the last session of the legislature at which he presided, take a crowd off to drink champagne at a barroom known as the Rialto, in Montgomery, and when remonstrated with for his extravagance, he ran his hand in his pocket and pulled out seventeen one-hundred-dollar bills, with the remark that he could afford it, as he had made that much in one day in engineering a bill through the house.” The general further testified that Eugene Beebe, of Montgomery, told him he paid Harrington a sum of money to advocate a lottery charter before the house. He said that of the representatives whom he “approached” on the subject of the lottery, only one, a negro, exhibited any qualms, and he accepted fifty dollars, protesting that it was only “as a loan.”
When Colonel Joseph Hodgson became superintendent of education, he said that county superintendents had embezzled between $50,000 and $60,000 of school funds. Two sons of the former state superintendent were fugitives on that account.
Mr. P. T. Sayer, speaking of the Montgomery county representatives in the lower house of the legislature, said: “One of them is a man who came from Austria, by the name of Stroback. I understood that he was a sutler or something of that kind in the federal army. I further understood that he never has been naturalized; I do not know about that. He was said to be a gentleman in his own country; I do not know about that, but he certainly is not one in Montgomery. He is a man of a great deal of sense, and I think a dangerous man in any community situated as ours is. The others are three negroes.”
These character sketches of radical officials might be multiplied indefinitely, but the monotony would weary the reader. Necessarily others will be mentioned incidentally as this story of reconstruction progresses.