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
