The Freedmen's Savings Bank

Bibliographic data

Monograph

Identifikator:: 897231309

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-12220

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Sawelieff, Maximilian http://d-nb.info/gnd/1036372987

Title:: Die Eisenindustrie in Südrußland

Place of publication:: Weida i. Th.

Publisher:: Druck von Thomas & Hubert, Spezialdruckerei für Dissertationen

Year of publication:: 1911

Scope:: 1 Online-Ressource (130 Seiten)

Digitisation:: 2017

Collection:: Economics Books

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Title page

Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Title page

Collection:: Economics Books

110 THE FREEDMEN’S SAVINGS BANK rated. Its treasury was wholly unequal to the task of sus- taining the magnificent expenditures of the board of public works, presided over by H. D. Cooke, and controlled by Mr. A. R. Shepherd. Some exchequer must be found to advance upon the depreciated bonds and worthless audi tor’s certificates of the District, or the contracts must fail, and the speculators of the pool and of Shepherd and his friends in out-of-the-way and unimproved town lots come to grief. This mass of putridity, the District govern- ment, now abhorred of all men, and abandoned and re- pudiated even by the political authors of its being, was represented in the bank by no less than five of its high officers, viz., H. D. Cooke, George W. Balloch, William S. Huntington, D. L. Eaton, and Z. B. Richards, all of whom were in one way or other concerned in speculations more or less dependent for a successful issue on sustaining the contractors under the board of public works, and a free use of the funds of the Freedmen’s Bank. They were high in power, too, with the dominant influence in Con- gress, as the legislation they asked or sanctioned and ob- tained, fully demonstrated. Thus it was that without consulting the wishes or re- garding the interests of those most concerned—the de- positors—the vaults of the bank were literally thrown open to unscrupulous greed and rapacity. The toilsome savings of the poor Negroes, hoarded and laid by for a rainy day, through the carelessness and dishonest conni- vance of their self-constituted guardians, melted away— vanished into thin air in the form of millions of so-called assets, on which by no possible contingency can fifty cents on the dollar be ever realized to the unfortunate victims of heartless duplicity and misplaced confidence. The wolves literally became the pastors of the flock, and, without compunction or remorse, devoured the young- lings committed to their care. In the foregoing narrative your committee have neces- sarily, though somewhat incidentally, touched upon and pointed out the prime, but remote and indirect, causes of failure of the Freedmen’s Bank—which was the utter and complete omission to provide in the law of its organization any safeguards for the protection of the depositors, who

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