Five years later the testimony taken in Alabama at the instance of the minority members of the Ku Klux Committee exposed the methods of the cotton agents.[762] The country swarmed with agents or pretended agents and their spies or informers; the commission given was from one-fourth to one-half of all cotton collected; everybody's cotton was seized, but for fear of future trouble a proposition from the owner to divide was usually listened to and a peaceable settlement made; when private or public cotton was shipped it was consigned by bales and not by pounds; the various agents through whose hands it passed were in the habit of "tolling" or "plucking" it, often two or three times, about one-fifth at a time; in this way a bale weighing 500 pounds would be reduced to 200 or 300 pounds; even after the private cotton arrived at Mobile or New Orleans, paying "toll" all the way, it was liable to seizure by order of some Treasury agent; as a rule, terms could be arranged by which a planter might keep one-fourth to three-fourths of his cotton, whether Confederate or not; it was safer for the agent to take a part of the cotton with the consent and silence of the owner than to steal both from the owner and from the government for which he pretended to work, and in this way the owners saved some for themselves; much private cotton was seized on the plantations near the rivers before the owners came home from the war; cotton seized in the Black Belt was shipped to Simeon Draper, United States cotton agent, New York, while that from north Alabama was sent to William P. Mellen, Cincinnati;[763] complaint was made by those few owners who succeeded in tracing their cotton that, after being reduced by "tolling" or "plucking,"[764] it was sold by the agent in the North, by samples which were much inferior to the cotton in the bales, and in this way the purchaser, who was in partnership with the agents, would pay ten or fifteen cents a pound for a lot of cotton certainly not worth more than that if the samples were honest, but which was really good cotton, worth 35 cents to $1.20 a pound in New York.