John Harrison Wilson, The life of Charles Henry Dana

[308] the business, and recognizing that an example must be made, when the last day of grace expired he put the machinery of the law in motion, and within twenty-four hours arrested each of the defaulters, and started him on the way to Washington for trial by a military commission. Seven contractors were caught and confined in military prison. Most of them were tried, convicted, fined, and sentenced to the penitentiary, where the worst of them were held till after the end of the war. Of course the proceedings were arbitrary and unusual, and were followed by a great outcry of the politicians high and low, but both Dana ad the secretary stood firm; the law and the revised regulations were enforced to the letter, and although one case was afterwards carried to the Supreme Court, the new system was upheld in all its parts. The result was that the business of the bureau was put on a sound basis, the remounts purchased thereafter were good and serviceable, and although the prices paid soon adjusted themselves to the new standard, the measures resorted to were successful in putting an end to the frauds which had come to be the rule rather than the exception in that branch of army business.

But this was not the only case of the kind. Nearly every other branch of the army supply business was permeated by fraud, and what made it more difficult to deal with was the fact that some of the most competent and most energetic contractors were the most dishonest. Not content with a fair profit, they sought those contracts in which “the tricks of the trade” could be most easily practised, and their capital most rapidly turned over. In tents, a lighter cloth or a few inches off of the size; in harness, split leather; in saddles, inferior materials and workmanship; in shoes, paper soles; in clothing, shoddy; in mixed horse-feed, chaff and a larger proportion of the cheaper grain; in hay, straw and weeds; in fuel, inferior grades of