"White man bery unsartin": "Nigger haint got no friends, no how"; the blackest chapter in the history of the Republican Party; the men who robbed and combined to rob the freedmen of their hard earnings.Adams, F. Colburn (Francis Colburn)
History
"White man bery unsartin": "Nigger haint got no friends, no how"; the blackest chapter in the history of the Republican Party; the men who robbed and combined to rob the freedmen of their hard earnings.
Adams, F. Colburn (Francis Colburn)
Freedman's Savings and Trust Company
The sad story of greed recorded in the above account of fees is so well
told as to render comment by me unnecessary. And yet the above is by no
means all lawyer Enoch Totten got of the money of the washers and the
scrubbers, the very poor and the very ignorant. He can afford to ride in
his coach; and I hope he can sleep at night with the self-satisfaction
that he has been just and generous to the poor freedmen who had been so
cruelly robbed, and had pocketed only what was right of their money.
Not very long since, Mr. Frederick Douglas said there were men in
Washington, living in palaces, and riding in their coaches, who were
prominent in robbing his people of their hard earnings. Mr. Douglas never
told a greater truth. I envy no man destined to carry a guilty conscience
through the world with him.
To turn to this lawyer Totten, he may be eminent as a lawyer, but I never
heard of it. Nor have I ever heard that his reputation at the Washington
Bar was such as to entitle him to excessive fees.[2] I have heard of
Attorney-at-Law Totten, in connection with the “Beaufort and Texas Prize
Claim,” which, in the language of District Attorney Wells, was one of the
very worst frauds invented to get nearly a million dollars out of the
Treasury of the United States.
I am assured that the legal services rendered by Mr. Totten, were of
a very simple and commonplace kind; and that there are at least fifty
members of the Washington Bar, as good and perhaps better lawyers than
Mr. Totten, who would have gladly performed the service for one-sixth of
the amount charged.
You have in the above a faint glimpse of the ways and means by which the
money of these poor, plundered people is disappearing. And yet these
well paid Commissioners, who have proven themselves so recreant to this
trust, tell us with a coolness that challenges our credulity, that they
have “no knowledge of any improper use of the funds of the company to
which reference is made in the preamble of the resolution of the House
of Representatives.” How very innocent these Commissioners are. Their
innocence is only equalled by Mr. Attorney-at-Law Totten’s great respect
for the money of his clients, the washers and the scrubbers, the very
poor and the very ignorant. It was Sheridan, I believe, who said that if
he wanted to find a first-class scoundrel, heartless and soulless, he
would search for him in the legal profession. Had he lived in this age of
Christian statesmen he certainly would have improved on that.
MORE FEES FOR LEGAL SERVICES.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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