Fifty years in Wall Street

by Henry Clews

The South immediately after the war had greater advantages than most people imagine, if it had only taken hold of them in the right spirit. It had various sources of prosperity, which under prudent management would have enabled it to leave the North far behind in the race for wealth. Its leading staples, cotton, tobacco, and rice, had all a gold value in the markets of the world.

This opportunity of going in to produce at hard-pan prices on a gold basis invested it with an immense leverage against the North, with its inflated currency and war prices, growing out of the large issue of paper money necessary to carry on the war, and consequent over-speculation as a natural result or sequence.

It seemed to me, then, that, while the South had a grand opening for growth in prosperity on a solid basis to begin with, the business of the North was, in comparison, in an inflated position, that must burst before it could get a fair start on a solid foundation. It appeared as if it would sooner or later suffer a temporary collapse, while the South had only to begin and build without fear of any such interruption.

I, therefore, selected for my investments as the best fields in the South the two States that stood the highest in their financial credit, in their character for integrity and enterprise, and that then had the brightest outlook, namely Georgia and Alabama.

These States took my money freely, issued their State securities, their County securities, sold me their bonds, and got me thoroughly interested, and that to a very large extent, and then treated me with the basest ingratitude, repudiating their bonds, and cheating me out of my money and property in every way conceivable.

I attribute the cause of this unjust treatment, however, to Andrew Johnson, who, by accident, through the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, became President of the United States.

Mr. Johnson was a Tennesseean, loyal during the war to all appearances, and for all practical purposes of the Union cause, and he would doubtless have so remained had it not been for the unfortunate circumstance of Abraham Lincoln’s death.

This made him Executive of the nation, for which by ability he was amply fit and qualified, but through bias and temperament, entirely unfit to fill creditably this eminent position for the best interests of the country at large.

The position I took, as above stated, was, that since the war was over, it was a thing to be forgotten as speedily as possible. The finality was seriously delayed owing to the hostility that President Johnson did his best to excite and prolong amongst the people of the South.

Congress, it will be remembered, was leniently disposed in the passing of measures and framing of laws to bring the traitorous States of the South back again into the Union. The members of Congress most cautiously and delicately worked to patch up old sores that were supposed to exist between the victors and the vanquished, but when their bills went to the President they were unmercifully subjected to a wholesale process of vetoing, almost indiscriminately. This produced a condition of chronic hostility between the legislative and executive branches of the Government, and the wider the breach became the stronger and more vindictive grew the spirit which it naturally aroused in the Southern people.