gave to Butler much to the general disgust. His choice of Simmons, "the young Christian Soldier," a Methodist class leader and Butler's henchman, for Collector of the Port of Boston, aroused resentment in the State and stirred to protest men like Sumner, Pierce, Whittier, and Holmes, all bitterly opposed to Butler's strong ambition to be Governor. Six New England Senators voted against Simmons, only one for confirmation. The Hoar brothers tried to induce Grant to withdraw the nomination; but Grant was obdurate. "Butler says he has a hold on you," said Judge Hoar, as he sat beside the President; and Rhodes, to whom this story came direct, relates that "Grant set his teeth, then drew down his jaw, and without changing countenance looked Hoar straight in the eye, but said not a word. A long and painful silence ensued and Hoar went away." George F. Hoar in his "Autobiography" tells how he broached the Simmons topic while walking with the President by Lafayette Square. Grant quietly replied that to withdraw the nomination would do injustice to the young man. The conversation continued in a friendly vein until they turned the corner by Sumner's house, when Grant's whole manner changed, and shaking his closed fist he said, "I shall not withdraw the nomination. That man who lives up there has abused me in a way which I have never suffered from any other man living!" This was in the winter of 1873, only a few weeks before Sumner's sudden end. The scandal of the Sanborn contracts grew out of Butler's influence with the Administration. William A. Richardson, who had been Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Boutwell and who succeeded Boutwell when the latter became a Senator, came from Lowell, Butler's town. Richardson had no administrative service save in the Washington departments. It was of him that George F. Hoar remarked, when asked about his Massachusetts record, "his reputation is strictly national." In 1872 Congress had repealed the dangerous law by which informers. received a moiety of the recoveries from delinquent payers of internal revenue taxes, but a clause had been smuggled into an appropriation bill empowering the Secretary of the Treasury "to employ not more than three persons to assist the proper officers of the Government in discovering and collecting any money belonging to the United States whenever the same shall be withheld." Under this clause, Richardson, first as Assistant Secretary, afterwards as Secretary of the Treasury, made contracts with John D. Sanborn, a Boston friend of Butler's, already in the Government's employ as special agent for the Treasury, to collect taxes which were said to have been evaded by distillers, railroad companies, legatees, and others. By successive amendments to his contract, Sanborn induced the Treasury officials to let him gather in his net several thousand individuals and almost every railroad company in the United States, and to wink at fraudulent swearing to delinquencies. Under this contract $427,000 was collected, from which Sanborn received his moiety of $213,500. Of his share Sanborn testified that $156,000 was spent in hiring men to help him carry on the work, and most of this, it has been intimated, went to those who were engaged in the advancement of Butler's political designs. A congressional committee in 1874 found that a large percentage of the revenue collected was not a proper subject for contract under the law and would have been collected by the Internal Revenue Bureau in ordinary course; that many of the transactions were fraudulent, and that the Commissioner of Internal Revenue had been studiously ignored throughout. They agreed unanimously to report a resolution that the House had no confidence in Richardson and demanded his removal. When Grant got word of this he sent for individual members of the committee and urged them to withhold the resolution, with the understanding that the Secretary should resign and be taken care of in some other branch of service. As no one intimated that |