Grant campaign (1872), when Horace Greeley was making
his astounding run for President, the New York Sun hinted at gross and
wholesale briberies of Congressmen by Oakes Ames and his associates who
had built the Union Pacific Railroad, an enterprise which the United
States had generously aided with loans and gifts.

Three committees of Congress, two in the House and one in the Senate
(the Poland Committee, the Wilson Committee, and the Senate Committee),
subsequently investigated the charges. Their investigations disclosed
the fact that Ames, then a member of the House of Representatives,
the principal stockholder in the Union Pacific, and the soul of the
enterprise, had organized, under an existing Pennsylvania charter,
a construction company called the Credit Mobilier, whose shares were
issued to Ames and his associates. To the Credit Mobilier were issued
the bonds and stock of the Union Pacific, which had been paid for "at
not more than thirty cents on the dollar in road-making." * As the United
States, in addition to princely gifts of land, had in effect guaranteed
the cost of construction by authorizing the issue of Government bonds,
dollar for dollar and side by side with the bonds of the road, the
motive of the magnificent shuffle, which gave the road into the hands of
a construction company, was clear. Now it was alleged that stock of the
Credit Mobilier, paying dividends of three hundred and forty per cent,
had been distributed by Ames among many of his fellow-Congressmen, in
order to forestall a threatened investigation. It was disclosed that
some of the members had refused point blank to have anything to do with
the stock; others had refused after deliberation; others had purchased
some of it outright; others, alas!, had "purchased" it, to be paid for
out of its own dividends.

* Testimony before the Wilson Committee.

The majority of the members involved in the nasty affair were absolved
by the Poland Committee from "any corrupt motive or purpose." But Oakes
Ames of Massachusetts and James Brooks of New York were recommended for
expulsion from the House and Patterson of New Hampshire from the Senate.
The House, however, was content with censuring Ames and Brooks, and the
Senate permitted Patterson's term to expire, since only five days of it
remained. Whatever may have been the opinion of Congress, and whatever a
careful reading of the testimony discloses to an impartial mind at
this remote day, upo