XXIV

"Pig Iron" Kelley by any other measure would have had no business to do with actually going to Alabama. A Pennsylvania abolitionist and Radical Republican congressman, he detested the Democratic Party and was an impassioned advocate of the freedman. Ostensibly that's why came to Limestone County by the cars from Philadelphia - to observe the negro's condition. He would do so in an extravagant junket trailed by a bootlicking political entourage that lazily made its way south like a caravan of Mughals. As it were, he met with The Major, Bonwit Vrooman, at the Nickajack Hotel to discuss the future of the Freedman's Bureau. Pig Iron wore a tweed frock coat of pedestrian make that contrasted with The Major's fine Italian linen suit and Chinese silk cravat. So it was that the congressman was such a zealous protectionist that he only bought American-made. The niceties were rushed. The congressman was a busy man.

I don't need to tell you that your little cabal here is f****d, Bonwit. The Major was taken aback. Kelley lit a monstrous cigar and exhaled a nimbus of smoke. You know what's going in Washington? Congress is about the defund the Freedman's Bureau. Nobody wants coloreds on the government teat anymore. You've done great work here, Bonwit. But I'm afraid the curtain is closing on your little show. I get the long face. You've got a lot invested here. Well that's why I've come. We're here to lift up the negro. Luckily that can still be a profitable enterprise for the both of us.
The Major was listening. Kelley continued.

 
He explained how millions in railroad bonds were being issued to rebuild the Memphis & Charleston Railroad, which was still damaged from the war. Specifically, only a train ferry then existed linking the M&C between Decatur and Limestone County across the Tennessee River. The original stone pier railroad bridge had been burned down by the Yankees in '62. Construction of the bridge was going to take three years. The bonds themselves were backed by the Alabama state coffers, which cut the Republican governor into the deal, William Hugh Smith. They were solicited out to Northern investors by the Lehman Brothers, Henry and Emanuel, who were Jewish cotton brokers in Montgomery with shady Wall Street connections. The public offering was a stunning success for Radical Republicans who promised vast employment for the tens of thousands of freedman looking for better wages and freedom of movement that railroad work entailed.

 
Governor William "Skedaddle" Smith grew rich off the bond deal. He was Alabama's first of only two Republican governors before Guy Hunt was elected in a landslide over 110 years later. Both of these governors, the other being David "Beechnut" Lewis, had deep connections to the Nickajack Unionism movement during the war. Smith was sneered at as Skedaddle because he fled to Union lines when we couldn't get elected the Confederate Congress. He spent the rest of the war in Huntsville, Ala. recruiting Unionists across the Nickajack into the 1st Alabama Cavalry (US) without doing any actual fighting himself.

 
"Pig Iron" Kelley explained he represented a Consortium of investors - good Party men like yourself, he added. This Consortium owned the management company Huntsville Railroad Corporation, each investor holding a 1% stake in the entity. These investors included bankers, politicians, generals, and industrialists affiliated with the Republican establishment - all good Party men like yourself, he said again. We hold the contract for the new railroad bridge over the Tennessee River at Decatur. We need your labor. And now that the Freedman's Bureau is about to get defunded, you could use the money to keep up the good work you're doing down here. The HRC can give you 20% margin on your labor, but mind you this will be paid all up front.

 
What Pig Iron did not explain was the the HRC was just a post office box at the Huntsville Depot. A check for $4,000,000 (less "loan costs") payable to the Memphis & Charleston was written out by Lehman Brothers which had underwritten the bond sale. The check arrived at the Eastern Division headquarters of the Memphis & Charleston Railroad, which had only one employee at Huntsville Depot and whose only purpose was to deposit the check and subsequently draw a cashier's check for $4,000,000 on the bridge contract, payable to the HRC.

An accountant from Huntsville named Asher Applebaum arrived later to collect the check, who was the bookkeeper for HRC, which had no employees at all. He deposited the check at the National Bank of Huntsville, which was a great temple of money overlooking the Big Spring. Then at the desk of the bank president spent all $4,000,000 within the space of half an hour. Cashier checks were drafted for stockholder dividends and overbid subcontracts controlled by Consortium interests. When this was done, he closed the bank account and prepared financial statements showing a 15% profit margin for the investors, who had already cashed their dividend checks. Then the Consortium took the company public and dumped the stock on the back of a bogus prospectus. The deal was so clean that everyone from the governor on down thought to try it again to build the railroad from Chattanooga to Birmingham. And so later they did, nearly bankrupting the state.

 
The Major always thought himself a good Party man. What if they cut him in on the Huntsville Railroad Corporation someday? So he took the deal and four months later the Democrats indeed shut down the spigots from Washington. But since the Freedman's Bureau still technically existed, it had only one office left open in the waning years of existence, which was on Pryor Street in Athens. Asher Applebaum was hired to manage its manage its finances, for it held several subcontracts for which The Major held interests. And the labor was paid fairly, as implored by Pig Iron Kelley, who indeed cared for the freedman's condition, as did The Major. Strangetown continued to boom even as the Freedman's Bureau withered on the vine of history.