The conditions of society were ripe for this daring enterprise.
Not only was the Ship of State in the hands of revolutionists who had boarded her in the storm stress of a civic convulsion, but among them swarmed the pirate captains of the boldest criminals who ever figured in the story of a nation.
The first great Railroad Lobby, with continental empires at stake, thronged the Capitol with its lawyers, agents, barkers, and hired courtesans.
The Cotton Thieves, who operated through a ring of Treasury agents, had confiscated unlawfully three million bales of cotton hidden in the South during the war and at its close, the last resource of a ruined people. The Treasury had received a paltry twenty thousand bales for the use of its name with which to seize alleged "property of the Confederate Government." The value of this cotton, stolen from the widows and orphans, the maimed and crippled, of the South was over $700,000,000 in gold—a capital sufficient to have started an impoverished people again on the road to prosperity. The agents of this ring surrounded the halls of legislation, guarding their booty from envious eyes, and demanding the enactment of vaster schemes of legal confiscation.
The Whiskey Ring had just been formed, and began its system of gigantic frauds by which it scuttled the Treasury.
Above the mall towered the figure of Oakes Ames, whose master mind had organised the Crédit Mobilier steal. This vast infamy had already eaten its way into the heart of Congress and dug the graves of many illustrious men.
