Monday, Jul. 14, 1958

Scoundrel or Scapegoat?

PRINCE OF CARPETBAGGERS (319 pp.) --Jonathan Daniels--Lippincott($4.95).

He was so strikingly handsome that an army chaplain called him "beautiful to behold"; yet historians of the Reconstruction era have dubbed him "the outstanding figure in filth." He was cited for gallantry at Shiloh--and lived to be reviled as "Prince of Bummers." He was a devoted family man, and yet spent much of his time with another man's wife. Some $16 million in bonds, three mansions, a railroad, and countless acres of timberland passed through his hands; but the day came when he was jailed for skipping out on a $94 hotel bill. This contradictory, little-known figure of U.S. history was Union General Milton Smith Littlefield. In this book, North Carolina Author (A Southerner Discovers the South) and Editor (Raleigh News and Observer) Jonathan Daniels offers a tantalizing answer to the question of what Littlefield was really like.

Era of Moral Ambiguity. As Daniels sees it, the Prince of Carpetbaggers was part scoundrel and part scapegoat and, as such, an apt symbol of the moral ambiguity of the Reconstruction period. Author Daniels argues that U.S. folklore has too gullibly enshrined the popular Southern myth of the carpetbagger as a devilish Yankee loot-and-run artist. In fact, he was sometimes a champion of Negro rights, sometimes a businessman with venture capital to invest, sometimes a restless Northern war veteran with a yen to revisit the South. If the carpetbagger's hand was plunged in the public till, his arm was frequently locked in that of a sly Southern collaborator who was only too happy to share the take. Unfortunately, Author Daniels' carpetsweeping approach to carpetbagger days often buries both his hero and his point in irrelevant memorabilia, including the names of countless small-fry politicos.

The notorious Milton began his career innocuously enough. Born in upstate New York on July 19, 1830, he taught school in Michigan, later practiced law in Illinois. An early Lincoln partisan (his younger brother John worked in the Lincoln-Herndon law office in Springfield), Milton reputedly hoisted Honest Abe onto the crowd's shoulders at one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, while The Rail Splitter protested: "Don't. Don't. This is ridiculous." After captaining one of the quasi-military Republican abolitionist outfits known as the "Wide Awakes," Milton marched away to the Civil War as a volunteer officer of 30.

Serpentine Ally. At Shiloh, according to newspaper accounts, the good captain "stood erect in front of his men, during the whole engagement, but escaped all injury, except having about three inches torn from the left shoulder of his coat, by a ball from the enemy." General Sherman made him a lieutenant colonel and assistant provost marshal of Memphis, where, even in 1862, blockaded cotton was being feverishly and profitably traded to Northern mills. At Lincoln's command, Littlefield later organized one of the first Negro regiments. By war's end. General Littlefield's character, as well as his uniform, was still nearly "as immaculate as Lee's."

What changed him Biographer Daniels does not know, and he refuses to guess. Perhaps the general simply could not confine his venturesome ego to a small Philadelphia lumber business and a placid, happy marriage. Backed by capital that may or may not have come from Wall Street, Littlefield went back to the South in 1867 with a bold scheme that was tactically watertight--and morally as leaky as a sieve. The plan was to buy up defaulted North Carolina railroad bonds for pennies, lobby or bribe the legislature into redeeming them, and sell on the rise. Littlefield found a ready ally in a pious, serpentine North Carolina banker named George W. Swepson.

Retreat to New York. Milton was no hidden persuader. He opened a bar in the west portico of the state capitol at Raleigh to sway the legislators. Many North Carolinians still insist that the chipped stone steps of the capitol were broken by the barrels of booze rolled up and down them in those days.

With his smartly clipped beard, fawn-colored trousers and "killing cravat," Littlefield was a kind of one-man giveaway show. As one admirer put it: "With money he was as free as water, and when he had no money was just as free with checks." All through the late 1860s, he had the money, shelled out as much as $241,000 at a session to get the legislation he and his associates wanted. Eventually, the Swepson-Littlefield interests floated their own bonds for railroad lines they never built. They snapped up land at distress sales, bought state-owned cotton at 33-c-. which they quickly sold on the open market at 47-c-. Littlefield branched out into Florida and became president of the Jacksonville, Pensacola & Mobile Railroad.

Ironically, Littlefield had just decided that he really wanted to run his honest-to-goodness railroad when all his loans began to slip their bonds. In the panic of '73, his empire fell. But before that his pal Swepson had disowned him and declared himself insolvent, although he subsequently died a millionaire, to be buried under the epitaph "Trusting in Jesus for Salvation." Little eld's great and good friend Mrs. Ann Cavarly, the wife of an associate, played the self-appointed blabbermouth before investigating committees, while Democratic journalists howled for the staunchly Republican general's head. But none of the charges against him ever stuck.

Retreating to New York City, the general bore his last years of genteel poverty lightly. Natty and erect to the day of his death in 1899, the aging Milton Littlefield invariably wore a flower in his lapel. It was the only thing anyone ever pinned on the prince of carpetbaggers.

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