John Harrison Wilson, The life of Charles Henry Dana

[434] held up to public scorn the name of Oakes Ames, for distributing gratuitously the stock of the Credit Mobilier, which had made enormous profits out of the construction of the Union Pacific Railway, and exposed such members of Congress and other public men by name as had accepted that stock in exchange for their votes and friendly offices. The revelations in this case constituted one of the most shameless scandals of our political history. They stained the character of one congressman, who lived it down and afterwards became President of the United States, and of another who became vice-president. They saddened the lives of more than one senator, and of many representatives who had no such ambition, but would have been content to remain in obscurity to the end of their days, if thereby they could have avoided the consciousness of their own unworthiness and retained the respect of their fellow-citizens.

But the Credit Mobilier, involving as it did men of the highest prominence and influence, was only the first, not the vilest nor the most wide-spread, scandal of the day. It was followed, and in a measure dwarfed, by the Safe Burglary Conspiracy and the frauds of the Whiskey Ring.

The first, it may be briefly stated, involved federal officials of the District of Columbia and a member of the President's official household who was also superintendent of public buildings. The conspiracy had for its object the ruin of a highly respected private citizen of Washington through an effort to implicate him in a sham robbery of the assistant district-attorney's safe by a gang of professional burglars hired for that purpose. The rascals were to take certain accounts connected with city contracts, which would be found therein, to the house of one Columbus Alexander, who had called for their production in court, and, while placing them in his house apparently as his agent, he was to be arrested with them and haled off