A. It is not.
Q. Describe that coffee as nearly as you can.
A. It seems to be a compound of roasted peas, of licorice, and a variety of other substances, with just coffee enough to give it a taste and aroma of coffee. [Footnote: House Report No. 2, etc. 1861- 62, ii: 1459.]
This committee extracted much further evidence showing how all other varieties of provisions were of the very worst quality, and how "rotten and condemned blankets" in enormous quantities were passed into the army by bribing the inspectors. It disclosed, at great length, how the railroads in their schedule of freight rates were extorting from the Government fifty per cent. more than from private parties. [Footnote: House Report No. 2, etc., 1861-62, xxix.] Don Cameron, leader of the corrupt Pennsylvania political machine, and a railroad manipulator, [Footnote: He had been involved in at least one scandal investigated by a Pennsylvania Legislative Committee, and also in several dubious railroad transactions in Maryland.] was at that time Secretary of War. Whom did he appoint as the supreme official in charge of railroad transportation? None other than Thomas A. Scott, the vice-president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Scott, it may be said, was another capitalist whose work has so often been fulsomely described as being that of "a remarkable constructive ability." The ability he displayed during the Civil War was unmistakable. With his collusion the railroads extorted right and left. The committee described how the profits of the railroads after his appointment rose fully fifty per cent in one year, and how quartermasters and others were bribed to obtain the transportation of regiments. "This," stated the committee, "illustrates the immense and unnecessary profits which was spirited from the Government and secured to the railroads by the schedule fixed by the vice-president of the Pennsylvania Central under the auspices of Mr. Cameron." [Footnote: House Report No. 2, etc., 1861-62, xix. The Pennsylvania Railroad, for example, made in 1862 the sum of $1,350,237.79 more in profits than it did in the preceding year.]
These many millions of dollars extorted in frauds "came," reported the committee, "out of the impoverished and depleted Treasury of the United States, at a time when her every energy and resources were taxed to the utmost to maintain the war." [Footnote: Ibid., 4.]
These are but a few facts of the glaring fraud and corruption prevailing in every line of mercantile and financial business. Great and audacious as Gould's thefts were later, they could not be put on the same indescribably low plane as those committed during the Civil War by men most of whom succeeded in becoming noted for their fine respectability and "solid fortunes." So many momentous events were taking place during the Civil War, that amid all the preparations, the battles and excitement, those frauds did not arouse that general gravity of public attention which, at any other time, would have inevitably resulted. Consequently, the men who perpetrated them contrived to hide under cover of the more absorbing great events of those years. Gould committed his thefts at a period when the public had little else to preoccupy its attention; hence they loomed up in the popular mind as correspondingly large and important.
A SPECIMEN OF GOULD'S TUITION.
At the very dawn of his career in 1857, as a railroad owner, Gould had the opportunity of securing valuable and gratuitous instruction in the ways by which railroad projects and land grants were being bribed through Congress. He was then only twenty-one years old, ready to learn, but, of course, without experience in dealing with legislative bodies. But the older capitalists, veterans at bribing, who for years had been corrupting Congress and the Legislatures, supplied him with the necessary information. Not voluntarily did they do it; their greatest ally was concealment; but one crowd of them had too baldly bribed Congress to vote for an act giving an enormous land grant in Iowa, Minnesota and other states, to the Des Moines Navigation and Railroad Company. The facts unearthed must have been a lasting lesson to Gould as to how things were done in the exalted halls of Congress. The charges made an ugly stir throughout the United States, and the House of Representatives, in self defense, had to appoint a special committee to investigate itself.
This committee made a remarkable and unusual report. Ordinarily in charges of corruption, investigating committees were accustomed to reporting innocently that while it might have been true that corruption was used, yet they could find no evidence that members had received bribes; almost invariably such committees put the blame, and the full measure of their futile excoriations, on "the iniquitous lobbyists." But this particular committee, surprisingly enough, handed in no such flaccid, whitewashing report. It found conclusively that corrupt combinations of members of Congress did exist; and in recommended the expulsion of four members whom it declared guilty to receiving either money or land in exchange for their votes. One of these four expelled member, Orasmus B. Matteson, it appeared, was a leader of a corrupt combination; the committee branded him as having arranged with the railroad capitalists to use "a large sum of money [$100,000] and other valuable considerations corruptly." [Footnote: Reports of Committees, House of Representatives, Thirty-fourth Congress, Third Session, 1856/57. Report No. 243, Vol. iii. In subsequent chapters many further details are given of the corruption during this period.]
But it was essentially during the Civil War that Gould received his completest tuition in the great art of seizing property and privileges by bribing legislative bodies. While many sections of the capitalist class were, as we have seen, swindling manifold hundreds of millions of dollars from a hard-pressed country, and reaping fortunes by exploiting the lives of the very defenders of their interests, other sections, equally mouthy with patriotism, were sneaking through Congress and the Legislatures act after act, further legalizing stupendous thefts.