The abuses of the impressment law.
--The Charleston
Courier, a paper which seldom addresses itself to any subject without being thoroughly informed upon what it writes, has the following facts relative to the impressment of provisions in that State:
‘
While numerous commissaries, post quartermasters, and other Government agents, have been, and are, practicing gross abuses, oppressing the people, menacing the towns and villages of the
State with starvation, and bringing the
Government into odium, the
Government is also largely to blame for a course of measures scarcely less censurable.
Prominent among Government abuses is the enforcement of the impressment law while the tithe or produce tax is in process of collection, and the tithes are waiting for the tithe-gatherer, and often waiting and even rotting for lack of his approach.
In addition to this, information is constantly reaching us of delay in collecting or transporting Government supplies after they are purchased, and waste and destruction of the same at or near Government or railroad depots.
On Friday last, at Bonneau's Station, on the Northeastern railroad, we saw Government corn in process of removal which had been purchased and stored, and been undergoing waste and damage there, ever since June or July last — both at the same depot, and at that near
Monck's Corner, we are told, large quantities of Government fodder, purchased in the vicinity, were suffered to be wasted, cattle feeding on it
ad libitum, and large portions of it rotting and diffusing offensive odors.
In Upper
St. John's a planter still has in his barn, put up in sacks, 1,200 bushels of corn, bought and paid for by the
Government in May last — a prey to weasels and rats — because no one has yet come for it. We were informed not very long ago that at
Charlotte, N. C., one had to walk for a considerable distance on bags of Government corn to reach the railroad depot, and that hogs were feeding on it
of Surely such criminal waste and abuses should challenge the attention of the proper authorities, and be met by proper remedies.
Without essential reforms in the
Commissary and Quartermaster Departments a like criminal waste will attend the collection of the produce or tithe tax.
’
