Lincoln's Spies by Douglas Waller

Author:Douglas Waller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2019-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

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By the end of the year, Baker had plunged into what became a controversial investigation even further afield of his secret service duties. Three days before Christmas 1863, he sat in the spacious Treasury office of Salmon Portland Chase, taking in its gray velvet carpet, black walnut desk, and carved window-cornices. The secretary, who had no detectives to investigate corruption in his department, had reluctantly asked Stanton to lend him one of his. Baker decided to take this assignment himself.

A seasoned lawyer who had risen in Ohio politics and had been one of Lincoln’s rivals for the presidency, Chase was an imposing and unsociable man of six foot two, who unlike Lincoln never joked and generally took a dark view of his boss—and, for that matter, the rest of the world. His home soon became a refuge for Lincoln critics, and just as soon Chase began plotting to deny the president a second term so he could replace him in the White House. Upon Chase’s broad shoulders rested the crushing responsibility to fund the Union’s warmaking capability through various combinations of taxes, fees, and bank and public loans that would keep coffers in the antiquated Treasury Department he inherited from hitting empty. To accomplish this huge assignment, the bureaucracy under Chase exploded to more than 2,000 employees, making him a patronage king in the federal government. No one accused Chase of being personally corrupt. For the most part his department operated efficiently. But he proved to be a poor judge of men, highly susceptible to flattery, hiring a good many sycophants who turned out to be incompetent or corrupt.

Baker was sitting in Chase’s office because of one bad apple. Charles Cornwall, whose job was to burn canceled Treasury notes, was caught embezzling up to $32,000 of them and returning the notes to circulation. Alarmed, as well as worried about mud splattering on his own political ambitions, Chase wanted Baker to probe the extent of fraudulent activity in the department. The detective soon arrested a warrant clerk by the name of G. A. Henderson who worked in Chase’s inner office and was suspected of taking gifts in exchange for giving priority to Treasury warrants for payment. Treasury officers complained that Baker botched the investigation of the case and prosecutors were forced to free Henderson for lack of evidence. But Chase did have him fired.

Baker kept digging on his own and soon uncovered what he claimed was a major scandal in the way U.S. currency was printed. Until August 1862, all of it along with financial notes the Treasury Department issued were printed by three New York banknote firms: the American, National, and Continental companies. These businesses shipped the printed sheets for securities such as money, government bonds, and postage currency to the Treasury Department, where the time of a lot of employees was consumed cutting and trimming the paper by hand. The entire process was expensive. Chase was convinced there had to be a cheaper way to print the nation’s currency notes.

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