Heading: (Mining)
Author:
Title: Autograph Letter, regarding Benjamin Franklin "Beast" Butler's mining scheme
Place Published: Brooklyn, NY
Publisher:
Date Published: May 27, 1865
Description:

Autograph Letter, signed with indecipherable initials. 2 pp. with original envelope.

To “Oscar” (D.O. Cleveland, Broadalbin, New York) : “…We have about completed the organization of the ‘Chemical Gold and Film Ore Reducing Co.’ at 64 Broadway and I am its Genl. Agent, which I prefer to being Secy. And I am in hope to get a place for you by July…The Gov. has damaged me much. I would have had $25,000 stock in the Underground if he had signed the Bill. I hope he will yet sign the Baggage Bill. If so I will get something yet…” One month after Lee’s surrender and Lincoln’s assassination, the “Chemical Gold and Silver Ore Reducing Company” was incorporated in New York, with a $5 million capitalization. Its President was Benjamin Franklin Butler – the Massachusetts politician who, as a Union General, had so offended the citizens of New Orleans that he earned the epithet “Beast” Butler. After being relieved of his command by General Grant, Butler faded off from public view for a time, appearing briefly at the helm of this company, which intended to manufacture and market cost efficient “newly discovered invention” for separating precious metals from their ores by “disintegration” and “desulphurization”, applying liquid solutions to rocks “in a heated state”, reducing them to powder, while “volatile metals are expelled and the base metals oxidized”, leaving “silver or gold free for amalgamation”. Butler may have known little about such mining technicalities, but neither did the four other Republican politicians who were company trustees, including Lincoln’s first U.S. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, later Grant’s Secretary of the Treasury, and the U.S. Senator from silver-rich Nevada. This did not prevent the Company from peddling its patented invention in California and Colorado with the assurance that it would save mine owners $5,000 a day. The writer of this letter must have felt perfectly at home in this august company, since he already had a good eye for profit to be made by political savvy in such official plans as the construction of New York City’s “Underground Railway”.

Creased from mailing, fine.