speculators, who were organizing a raid upon the Freedmen's
money and resorted to . . . amendment
of the charter to facilitate their operations. . . . This
mass of putridity, the District government, now abhorred of all men, and abandoned and
repudiated even by the political authors of its
being, was represented in the bank by no less than
five of its high officers . . . all of whom were in
one way or other concerned in speculations involving a free use of the funds of the Freedmen's
Bank. They were high in power, too, with the
dominant influence in Congress, as the legislation
they asked or sanctioned and obtained, fully
demonstrated. Thus it was that without consulting the wishes or regarding the interests of those
most concerned—the depositors—the vaults of the bank were literally thrown open to unscrupulous greed and rapacity. The toilsome savings of the poor Negroes hoarded and laid by for a rainy day, through the carelessness and dishonest connivance of their self-constituted guardians, melted away."[1]
Even in bankruptcy the institution was not allowed to come under the operation of the ordinary laws but was liquidated and protected by a special law, the liquidators picking its corpse and
- ↑ Fleming, Vol. 1, pp. 382ff.
