But the germ of all the difficulties had already made its appearance. There were, as the officials believed, in Mobile itself, six thousand bales, and in the adjacent country not less than one hundred and twenty thousand, which captured records showed to be the property of the Rebel Government. Much of this was soon in the hands of private parties, who professed to have bought it from the Rebel authorities in good faith, to have given adequate compensation for it, and therefore to be now its legitimate owners. What was to be done in such a case? Or again: Planters had subscribed large amounts of cotton to the Rebel loan, under the same species of coercion by public sentiment which filled the Rebel ranks with men who had sturdily voted against secession in all its stages. The authorities had never removed the cotton; the former owners had been compelled to take care of it; they had steadily kept possession of it all the time, and they now claimed this possession to constitute ownership, arguing, plausibly enough, that their compulsory contracts (by subscription) with the Rebel Government had never been carried out, and that now it ill became the United States Government to undertake their enforcement. In other ways, and by all manner of side issues, the subject had become so inextricably complicated that the immediate representative of the Treasury Department in our party was at his wits’ ends. Naturally, Mr. Chase’s opinion had great weight, and it was freely given. He thought it wiser and better for the department over which he had presided, and which was now administered by one of his own most trusted appointees, to wash its hands of the whole business. Here was a quantity of cotton promised under compulsion to the Rebel Government. They never came to take it; in most cases it was never actually in their possession; it was now in the hands of its old owners. It would better comport with the dignity of a great and successful nation to leave it among this impoverished people, rather than enter into a confused scramble against ready swearers and men who felt that they were being cheated out of their all, in order to gather up and auction off the beggarly effects of the bankrupt Confederacy. In any event, the Government would be apt to realize very little from the effort, and it would lose far more in a wasted opportunity for diffusing good feeling and promoting the revival of industry than it would gain in cotton. Weeks, indeed, before this, while the party was at Key West, Mr. Chase had foreseen, from the indications along the Atlantic coast, the troubles in store, and had suggested what seemed to him the wisest policy for avoiding them. He would have had the President issue a proclamation setting forth substantially: