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CHAPTER XV. A NEW WAY TO PAY OLD DEBTS. JUSTICE SHIFTING THE SCENES AND
PROMPTING THE ACTORS.
ANOTHER class of questions which came before the provost-court at Alexandria excited at the time a large amount of interest; was discussed to some extent by many of the ablest journals of the country; resulted in the payment of several old debts—amounting to many thousands of dollars—in an entirely new way; and as no correct account thereof has ever yet appeared in historical form, we purpose in this chapter to relate the facts and incidents connected with one or two of the cases.
Though the causes of the war had been brewing for many, many years; though it was, indeed, as Mr. Seward had long before called it, an "irrepressible conflict," which could only be settled by the sacrifice of thousands of lives and millions of treasure; though threats, louder, deeper, and more ominous, came year after year from Southern States, and that, too, from a class of men whom all acknowledged could act as well as threaten whenever they chose to put their threats into execution,—yet, when the storm did finally burst upon the country, it seemed to tens of thousands in the North like a clap of thunder from a clear sky, so wholly were they unprepared for it. Especially was this true among merchants, and still more especially was it true with that class of merchants who, for many years previously, had been selling goods to Southern merchants, and buying from them cotton, sugar, rice, and tobacco. These merchants had, of course, a great many pleasant personal acquaintances throughout the South; they had often been at their customers' stores, dined with their families, been upon their plantations, visited their sugar-mills, witnessed the workings of their cotton-gins, admired the wonderful power of their cotton-presses, heard their negroes sing while picking the cotton, listened in raptures to the peculiar melodies of the negroes as they stripped the tobacco leaf or rolled it into fragrant cigars, and though, even at such times and in such places, they had frequently heard Southern merchants and Southern planters complain of what they called "Northern interference with slavery" and "Northern oppression because of tariffs," etc., etc., yet it had never occurred to them as possible that the time would come when these same men would try to break loose from the North and set up for themselves a separate confederacy.
Such had been the confidences between Northern and Southern merchants, that, for years previous to the war, the former had been in the habit of selling the latter goods on a whole year's credit This was necessitated, in part, from the fact that planters had got behind in their finances, and were compelled to pledge their next year's crops for their present year's supplies; but it was owing much more to the fact that confidence, very great confidence, had become established between the Northern and the Southern merchant. This confidence, and consequent long credit, resulted in the fact that, when the war actually commenced, the merchants and planters of the South owed the merchants and cotton factors of the North the enormous sum of two hundred millions of dollars.
Some part of this debt would probably have been paid had the Southern merchant and planter been left to his own free choice; but the governmental and military authorities of the South, with a view to cripple the North and strengthen themselves, had a law passed so early in the contest as May 21st, 1861, prohibiting all debtors owing money to Northern creditors from paying them, and requiring the payment of the amount into the Confederate treasury, either in specie or treasury notes, for which they were to receive a certificate of the payment bearing interest and redeemable at the close of the war. How much of the sum due the North was ever paid into the Confederate treasury is not known, but probably a very small proportion of the whole amount. The Government having virtually repudiated the claim towards the one to whom the debt was actually due, it was not unnatural that the merchant should repudiate it towards the Government, and when asked the question how much he owed the merchants of New York, Philadelphia, or Boston, his answer was, "Nothing at all," nor was the creditor or any one else present to dispute his answer. In this way at least one hundred and ninety of the two hundred millions due the North escaped payment altogether, while even the ten millions which we suppose to have been paid into the Confederate treasury were absorbed by English capitalists and others like the mist of a summer morning.
Among the Southern merchants who owed considerable amounts to merchants and manufacturers of the North were those of Alexandria. What may have been the gross amount of their indebtedness to the North is not definitely known, but certainly tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars.