Confederate armies; but in some instances these attorneys were arrested and threatened with imprisonment unless they abated their zeal in behalf of clients.

There was in resulting evil practices a touch of picturesqueness. The unconquered and unconquerable veterans of the vanquished southern armies, in many instances impoverished, were ripe for any enterprise which promised congenial adventure and spoils which they regarded as legitimate. The agents went about supported by federal troops, and many were the clashes between the latter and so-called guerrilla bands composed of their late antagonists on other and more glorious fields. These bands were actuated by the conviction that the Confederate government having had no clear title to ownership of the cotton, the conquerors succeeded to none; and so they took up the contest where the intimidated attorneys dropped it, and contested with the agents and their armed supporters. These agents were well supplied with army teams and wagons, and often these, falling into the hands of the “guerrillas,” served the captors as a convenient means of transportation of booty. Yet, it sometimes happened that the guerrillas were the captives, and when in the toils were in sore straits to raise the ransom which was exacted in lieu of arrest and arraignment for trial. Even steamboats were hauled to and relieved of cargoes. That was the golden era for steamboatmen, when freight charges and salaries, especially of pilots, were phenomenal.

These transactions soon degenerated into plunder pure and simple, involving private cotton to which the government could lay no sort of claim.

Perhaps there had been collusion between holders of “Confederate” cotton and the raiding bands which seized and bore it off; anyhow, the inevitable effect was that unscrupulous men, taking advantage of popular tolerance of practices which originally sprang from patriotic impulses, disregarded private rights and indiscriminately stole. Planters paid for guards as high as thirty dollars each per night at critical times. Men who were unaccustomed to the command of money grew rich in a brief space and correspondingly lavish in their expenditures. Extravagance and demoralization which left their enduring impress ensued. Admissions were made in high quarters in after years that not one-tenth of the proceeds of cotton seized by agents ever went into the treasury of the United States. One example will suffice: An agent in Demopolis claimed and was allowed for four months’ services, on the basis of one-fourth of the cotton seized by him, $80,000; and the settlement was between him and military authorities who were quite as adept as he in the art of pilfering. Thus in a time of stress the producers were despoiled and adventurers enriched by the ungenerous policy of the victorious government.

The following facts are gathered from evidence taken before the committee in Congress in the investigation as to General Howard:

At the close of the war there were held in the south at least five million bales of cotton, worth in Liverpool $500,000,000. Only a fraction of this cotton was owned by the Confederate states government, and this was turned over to General E. R. S. Canby by General E. Kirby Smith on May 24, 1865. Besides the swarm of official agents, informers and spies sent down by the Treasury Department in search of Confederate cotton, contracts were made with private individuals to engage in the work. Much cotton was taken from plantations before the owners returned to their homes after the disbandment of the armies. Seizures were indiscriminate. Proof of private ownership had to be supported by tender of toll; there was no redress.

A Treasury Department regulation required that all cotton seized in the Atlantic and Gulf states should be shipped to Simon Draper, United States cotton agent in New York City; and that seized on the upper Mississippi river and in northern Georgia and northern Alabama to William P. Mellen, agent in Cincinnati. These agents sold by samples which were spurious and inferior to the cotton which they represented. Accordingly, cotton worth sixty cents to one dollar per pound was sold for ten to fifteen cents. The purchasers were in collusion with the agent. By the system of “plucking,” the weight of bales was reduced anywhere from one hundred to two hundred pounds before they were sold: the plucked cotton was termed “waste cotton,” packed and sold as “trash” to mills, but not at trash prices. These terms figured only in the reports to the department. Sometimes owners traced stolen cotton to the New York or Cincinnati agency; and if a thousand bales were involved, the agent reported that only two hundred had been received, and of very inferior quality, and was sold for ten or fifteen cents per pound, which his books would prove; that transportation, storage and commissions left only a small sum. Draper, when he became cotton agent, was a bankrupt. Subsequently he settled his debts and when he died was a multimillionaire. Fifty million dollars’ worth of cotton was shipped to Draper; the government derived only $15,000,000 net from that source as the reward for the wrong which it had committed in entrusting the enforcement of its doubtful claim against the impoverished southern people to dishonest and unscrupulous agents.

The Confederate States government imposed a tax in kind upon all provisions produced on plantations—one-tenth. The first year after the war this tax was enforced in some isolated sections by orders of minor military officers, and collected by agents. Of course this was fraudulent, and was stopped after a while.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Freedmen’s Bureau

Meanwhile, the Freedmen’s Bureau had been established. General Swayne promulgated an order recognizing as agents of the bureau former civil magistrates who could and would obtain endorsement of negroes; but, as a rule, carpetbaggers filled the places. Offices were opened at the county seats, where complaints of freedmen were lodged and investigations conducted. The agents prescribed a uniform division of products of the soil between planters and hands. They supervised all contracts and regulated the conduct of affairs between employer and employe, and their dicta were absolute and final, being enforced, if necessary, by soldiers of the garrison.

The agents gave notice that nobody would be allowed to employ freedmen unless the contracts were submitted to and approved by them and left in their custody. They gave ear to any tale of complaining freedmen, arrested the white man complained of, tried and punished him, unless he proved willing to purchase immunity. Sometimes after the planter had contracted in the prescribed manner with freedmen, and had his crops in process of cultivation, the hands would quit work, and only intervention by the agent would make them return. Such intervention cost as high as ten dollars per hand, and the occasion for it might recur before the crops could be gathered. Some of the agents secured plantations and used them as refuges for dissatisfied freedmen, who were fed and clothed.

The agents were as a rule “fanatics without character or responsibility, and were selected as fit instruments to execute the partisan and unconstitutional behests of a most unscrupulous head.” (Senator Beck, in an official report.) Some of them were preachers, and had been selected as being the most devout, zealous and loyal of a certain religious sect. In league meetings they told the negroes that although they had been married according