The Whiskey Ring was a group of distillers who defrauded the government of millions of dollars in the 1870s. The national scandal stirred up by the exposure of the ring further tarnished the troubled presidency of Ulysses S. Grant and inspired a wave of reform.
In 1872 distillers in St. Louis, Missouri, devised a scheme to avoid the federal excise tax on whiskey. Paying off tax collectors to ignore the duty owed on their product, they began to earn tremendous profits. Working in collusion with a whole network of Treasury officials, the Whiskey Ring swindled the government of millions in tax revenues. The operation continued for several years, growing in size all the time. During this early period special agents of the Treasury tried to stop the fraud but were always unsuccessful.
Eventually, news of the racket began to escape from the circle of distillers and the government agents that the Whiskey Ring was paying off. Newspaper reporters who checked out the story were given money in exchange for silence. Government officials who stumbled upon the ring were also paid to look the other way, and a fund was set up by the ring to distribute payoffs to a broad range of storekeepers, government employees, and collectors. It would not be long, however, before the secret became too large to easily manage. Far beyond the original city of St. Louis, there were now branches of the ring in Chicago, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, New Orleans, Peoria, and most ominously, in Washington, D. C., the nation’s capital.
On May 1, 1875, newspapers in St. Louis reported that John D. McDonald, the city’s supervisor of U. S. revenues, had conspired to defraud the government of more than $2 million worth of excise taxes. McDonald, a very highly positioned official, had accepted bribes from the distillers in exchange for ignoring their requirement to pay the federal tax on whiskey. McDonald also happened to be a close personal friend and appointee of President Grant. On May 10, Secretary of the Treasury Benjamin H. Bristow launched the investigation that would put an end to the ring. Bristow’s agents seized 16 distilleries, and the indictments began.
The public uproar against the Whiskey Ring was deafening. As people learned just how far the corruption went, faith in the government and in their president declined sharply. After Bristow and the Treasury Department investigated the ring, 238 people were indicted, including President Grant’s private secretary, Gen. Orville Babcock. President Grant himself was not involved in the scandal, but his proximity to it led to numerous accusations against his presidency.
Although most of the people who were indicted were not convicted, the scandal did a great deal of political damage to the Grant administration. Things were not helped any when President Grant personally intervened to ensure that Babcock was not convicted. Shortly thereafter, however, Babcock resigned his position.
The Whiskey Ring was the worst of the scandals that plagued Grant’s presidency. The Credit Mobilier scandal, the resignations of his attorney general and secretary of the interior under suspicion of corruption, and the impeachment of his secretary of war for selling military appointments— combined with the exposure of the Whiskey Ring—left many with the impression that Grant’s administration and the federal government itself were hives of corruption.
After the Whiskey Ring was exposed, the effort to “clean up” the government reached a new pitch. A reform GOVERNOR from Ohio, Rutherford B. Hayes, was nominated by the Republican Party to be the next president. Due in part to the public anger over the Whiskey Ring, Hayes was elected on a platform of reform and honesty. Grant’s image as a president who allowed corruption to run rampant permanently damaged his reputation.
Further reading: John McDonald, Secrets of the Great Whiskey Ring; and Eighteen Months in the Penitentiary (St. Louis: W. S. Bryan, 1885); William S. McFeely, Grant: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982); Mark W. Summers, The Era of Good Stealings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
—Troy Rondinone
Whitman, Walt (1 819-1 892) journalist, poet, Union nurse
Renowned American poet and Civil War nurse Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, in Long Island, New York. He was the second child of Louisa van Velsor and Walter Whitman, Sr., both of them poor farm folk with little formal EDUCATION and a diminishing tract of family land. In 1823 the Whitmans took advantage of an economic boom and moved to Brooklyn, New York.
There, Whitman attended public school, and at the age of 12 he entered the printing trade. Over the next several years, Whitman worked as a printer, teacher, and eventually he became a journalist, editing a daily newspaper in New York at the age of 23. In 1846 Whitman became editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, but because of his Free-Soil politics, he was dismissed in 1848. After working two more years as a journalist in New Orleans and New York, Whitman built houses and sold real estate with his father from 1850 to 1855.
Throughout all of his years in New York, Whitman read voraciously and developed a love of THEATER and opera. Though he exhibited virtually no literary promise, Whitman published stories and poems in several newspapers and magazines. Eventually, he began experimenting with a new style of poetry, and in spring 1855, once he had composed several poems in this new style, Whitman published the first edition of Leaves of Grass at his own expense.
The text drew little attention, though Ralph Waldo Emerson praised it highly in a letter to Whitman. Another year went by before a revised second edition of Leaves
Walt Whitman (Library of Congress)
Of Grass was published. It too was a commercial failure. Following the release of the second edition, Whitman edited yet another daily newspaper, but he found himself once again unemployed by the summer of 1859. In 1860, however, a Boston publisher put out the rearranged and enlarged third edition of Leaves of Grass, which included Whitman’s “Calamus” poems. In these poems Whitman wrote of an apparent homosexual love affair, though it is uncertain whether or not the affair ever actually happened. The publisher went broke with the onset of the Civil War.
With the start of the war, Whitman composed and published several poems for recruitment purposes, many of which were later printed in Drum Taps (1865). When Whitman’s brother was wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg in 1862, he went to WASHINGTON, D. C., staying a while in his brother’s hospital camp and eventually taking a temporary post in the paymaster’s office. Using his spare time to visit wounded and dying soldiers in the Washington hospitals, Whitman bought and delivered small gifts to both Confederate and Union soldiers in an attempt to alleviate their mental and physical suffering.
By mid-1865 the atrocities ofthe war and the ASSASSINATION OF Abraham Lincoln had left Whitman somewhat disillusioned with life. His changing attitude is reflected in
Drum Taps, released in May 1865. Unlike Whitman’s earlier oratorical recruitment pieces, this poetic collection showed a keen awareness of the realities of war and included his most well-known allegorical poem, “O Captain, My Captain.” In the poem Whitman eulogizes President Abraham Lincoln by using the metaphor of a ship’s captain who has died at the end of a long voyage. The work concludes with one of Whitman’s most famous verses:
My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult, O shores, and ring O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
In fall 1865 Sequel to Drum Taps was published; the collection contained “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” another well-known elegy for Lincoln.
A reworked fourth edition of Leaves of Grass was issued in 1867. Whitman finally began garnering recognition, particularly in England, thanks to the writings of journalists William O’Connor and John Burroughs and the release of an English edition of his work edited by William Michael Rossetti.
Whitman fell ill in 1872, likely due to the emotional strain that resulted from his ambiguous sexuality. He was partially paralyzed by a stroke in January 1873, but in May he was healthy enough to journey to his brother’s home in Camden, New Jersey, where his mother had died. Due to his uncertain employment status and ill-health, Whitman decided to remain with his brother for several years, although by 1879 he was well enough to take an extended trip to the West.
In 1881 yet another edition of Leaves of Grass was published, and it was immediately denounced as immoral by the Society for the Suppression of Vice. Facing prosecution, the publisher gave the plates to Whitman, who printed an author’s edition of the book. to the publicity generated by this controversy, the book sold much better than any of the preceding editions, and Whitman was able to buy a cottage in Camden, where he spent the rest of his life delivering lectures and receiving admirers. In April 1888 he suffered another stroke that left him almost completely incapacitated. Whitman died March 26, 1892, and was buried in a tomb he designed himself.
See also nurses.
—Brian O’Camb
Further reading: Betsy Erkkila, Whitman the Political Poet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); James Edwin Miller Jr., Walt Whitman (Boston: Twayne, 1990); David R. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America (New York: Knopf, 1995); Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (New York: Metro Books, 2001).
Wigfall, Louis T. (1816-1874) lawyer, politician Louis Trezevant Wigfall was a Texas politician and secessionist. Wigfall was born in Edgefield, South Carolina, on April 21, 1816. He graduated from South Carolina College in 1837 and became an attorney. He espoused secessionist sympathies as early as 1844, when he protested the protective tariff and the defeat of a motion to annex Texas. (In 1845 another motion to make Texas a U. S. state succeeded.) Blunt and outspoken, Wigfall fought several duels and was forced to leave South Carolina in 1848. He settled in Marshall, Texas, and soon became a prominent proSouthern voice in local politics.
In 1859 Wigfall was appointed a U. S. senator, and he spent the next two years agitating for federal protection of slavery while opposing all attempts at compromise. In December 1860, in the wake of Abraham Lincoln’s election as president, he composed the “Southern Manifesto,” which declared conciliation hopeless and urged secession as the only viable alternative to subjugation. In January 1861 Wigfall joined five U. S. senators from Southern states to defeat the Crittenden Compromise, thus removing the country’s only possible alternative to war.
Wigfall left the U. S. Senate in March 1861 and reported for duty at Charleston, South Carolina, as an aide to Gen. Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard. There he gained a degree of notoriety by rowing out to the beleaguered Fort Sumter and demanding its surrender. In consequence of his staunch support for the Confederacy, Wigfall was appointed to command the Texas Brigade in October 1861, but he resigned this post to take his seat in the Coneederate Congress. He differed from many contemporaries by fully supporting the wartime measures of President Jeeeerson Davis, including conscription, impressment, and suspension of habeas corpus. But as time went on, he became one of Davis’s most strident critics. Wigfall helped to defeat Davis’s effort to create a Confederate Supreme Court, which he viewed as a menace to states’ rights. He especially opposed Davis’s military conduct of the war and was instrumental in having Gen. Robert E. Lee appointed general in chief in January 1865.
After the war Wigfall fled the country. He remained abroad until January 1874, and he died at Galveston, Texas, on February 17, 1874. He is remembered as an ardent eire-eater and secessionist.
Further reading: Alvy L. King, Louis T. Wigfall, Southern Fire Eater (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970).
—John C. Fredriksen
World History
