they were opposed to being conscripted themselves, although they were willing enough that other people should go and do their fighting for them.
The most obnoxious feature of the draft, however, had been in a measure overcome by the different states, cities, and towns offering liberal bounties for men to enlist. In this manner most of the quotas were filled, but the payment of bounties a demoralizing proceeding, under any circumstances opened the way for the most shameless and gigantic frauds. The story of the bounty jumping during the last two years of the war, is not one that any patriotic American citizen can read with complacency or satisfaction, and for pure infamy I think that it surpasses anything that the future historian of the war will be compelled to put on record.
Bounty Jumping and Other Frauds.
I had a good deal to do with these bounty -jumping frauds, and with a number of other matters very nearly as bad, or, perhaps, in the opinion of the reader, worse, and it may be thought that I was as culpable as those whom I now denounce. To those who are only willing to consider such a subject as this from one point of view, I have simply nothing to say; but fair-minded persons, North and South, will, how ever, freely admit that my actions as a secret agent of the Confederate government are not to be put in comparison with those of the dealers in human flesh and blood, the counterfeiters, and others who did what they did solely from motives of gain. At any rate, acting as I was under orders from the only government the authority of which I acknowledged, and animated only by an ardent desire to advance the interests of the cause which I had espoused, I felt that I was justified in embarrassing the enemy by any means in my power, and that the kind of warfare which I carried on in the rear of the Federal armies was just as legitimate as that which was carried on face to face with them in the field.
It was not pleasant for me to be brought into the relations I was with some of the most consummate scoundrels who ever escaped the gallows or the penitentiary, and it is impossible for me to reflect upon some of the features of my career as a Confederate secret service agent at the North with anything but regret that I should have been forced by circumstances
