Many stories have ascribed various reasons for the disgrace of this previously splendid man. According to some accounts, the jealousy of a woman acquaintance of Mrs. Belknap started the rumours and charges that led to the investigation of the private transactions of the Secretary of War. Owing to the fact that the charges made were proved, the nation was served with another scandal of most distressing type. The disclosures made by the lady seeking to destroy the prestige of the Belknaps caused it to be known that the first Mrs. Belknap persuaded her husband to appoint Caleb Marsh, husband of a friend of hers, post trader on the Indian Reservation at Fort Sill. Marsh secured the appointment and then made an agreement with the incumbent, who was preparing to bring political influence to keep the place, but who knew he could not compete with the appointee of the Secretary of War, allowing him to remain as long as $12,000 of the annual profits were paid over to him in quarterly instalments. This money was divided with the Secretary of War for two years, the payments being sent to Mrs. Belknap. Later, when it seemed advisable to reduce this annual bonus to $6,000, this sum was likewise so divided. Meanwhile, Mrs. Belknap died, and after the lapse of the proper period of mourning, the handsome widower with a young child to care for sought another wife, selecting the younger sister of his late wife, Mrs. Bowers, of Harrisonburg, Ky., widow of Colonel Bowers of the Confederate Army. They came to Washington and set up such lavish style of living as to lead people to believe Mrs. Belknap possessed of ample means. The disclosures of the investigation showed that Belknap, when Secretary of War, not only knew that $1,000 a month was being profiteered from the private soldiers, the coloured troops, 600 of them, of the Tenth Cavalry stationed at Fort Sill, for the small supplies they purchased at the trader’s shop on the reservation, but he also knew that one half of it came regularly to him to help him keep up his sumptuous quarters and extravagant style of living and enable his gay young second wife to continue indulging her taste for gowns from Worth of Paris. When an officer of the coloured regiment, after finding it useless to apply to the War Department for redress on the exorbitant prices at the post trader’s shop, wrote the details to Senator Sumner, then charges were formally made, and full investigation followed, showing that in the five years before this fraud was discovered $40,000 had been taken from these private soldiers, many of them freedmen, receiving their first pay of thirteen dollars a month. As soon as the charges were filed, General Belknap resigned. He appeared at a Cabinet meeting as usual one day, and the next was a prisoner at the desk in the police court. He was so distressed in his disgrace that he contemplated suicide. His resignation prevented impeachment.