Years of Preparation

The year 1861 began happily enough for Mr. and Mrs. Henry Olcott. In January of that year their first child was born-a son. He was named Richard Morgan after his maternal grandfather.

But the clouds of national conflict were darkening heavily, and in April, 1861, the Civil War began. As men do in war, Henry forgot his dislike of officialdom and authoritarianism. Suddenly it seemed that the things for which the North was fighting-the abolition of slavery, industrial progress, the solidarity of the nation through the continuance of the Union-were the most important in life. Agricultural journalism sank into insignificance.

Henry volunteered for action in the field, and we next hear of him as a signals officer. Writing of this period himself, he says: "I passed at the front the first year of the war, joining the Burnside expedition at Annapolis, participating in the capture of Roanoke Island, the battle of Newbern, the siege and capture of Fort Macon, the battles on the Rappahannock during Pope's retreat and other military operations." *

What his actual rank was at this time we do not know, but he was apparently in a position that enabled him to talk personally with General Burnside. Describing the attack on Roanoke Island in vessels of the wrong draught, hired for the army by agents at exorbitant prices, Olcott writes: "Conversing with Burnside as the vessel we were on stuck fast half-way over the swash, I offered to send an account of this infamy to the Northern press and denounce the responsible parties by name." *

The General felt, however, that he must take the responsibility himself, and did not accept Olcott's offer. But he probably made a mental note of it.

One day in the fall of 1862, when Henry was in Washington with his horse "ready saddled for a start next morning with General Burnside to join Hooker with the Ninth Corps," he found himself instead taken off to a military hospital. He was one of the many casualties of those wartime enemies-malaria and dysentery.

Two months later, while he was still convalescing, he received an order that both surprised and dismayed him. He was detailed to carry out special investigations into the operations of one Solomon Kohnstamm, a big army contractor who was suspected of fraud. Henry was puzzled as to why he, a signals officer, should have been chosen for this job. Agricultural science and journalism could scarcely be considered a training for such detective work. Had Burnside remembered the conversation at Roanoke Island and, feeling that Olcott's hatred of dishonest practices was sufficient qualification, recommended him? Or was it just one of those unaccountable things that happen in wartime?

The job was supposed to be a brief one. It should, they said, not take more than a fortnight to determine if Kohnstamm had been robbing Uncle Sam to the tune of some $25,000, as suspected. After that, Olcott would be free to rejoin his unit in the field.

So in November 1862, he started on the investigation. For the work he was stationed in New York and able to live at home. This was a compensation. Four months earlier, in June, his second son, William Topping, had been born. Richard Morgan Olcott was nearly two now. Dr. the Rev. Morgan preached the righteousness of the Northern cause from his pulpit, and Mary was proud of her hero from the battlefield. The hero himself reveled in the domestic felicity as a respite from the horrors, ugliness, and discomfort of the front.

But he was discovering a worse ugliness in the machinations of the "enemy" behind the lines. Corruption was on a much wider scale than had at first been suspected, and Kohnstamm was by no means the only villain. More and more cases of suspected fraud, corruption, and misconduct, came onto Olcott's desk at 93 Franklin Street, New York. The work increased; his staff of detectives and stenographers was enlarged; eventually he had to take an office in Washington as well as New York. The job, which was supposed to take a fortnight, went on and on.

Henry was given the rank of Colonel for this important, and frequently dangerous, task of bringing to book the racketeers or agents-some of them powerful and ruthless-who were either trying to make quick fortunes out of the war, or giving undercover help to the enemy. Olcott's correspondence with top officials at the War Department, written in the copperplate handwriting of the clerks of those days, reveals the variety and extent of his activities as Special Commissioner.

Among the matters into which he probed were: the sailing of vessels from New York with arms destined for the enemy, the corrupt complicity of high officers of both the services and the Government in trying to make personal profits out of the war, the issuing of passports in Washington to enemy agents to get through the lines, and the apprehension and arrest of spies and other southern agents in New York, who were, among other things, carrying dispatches to their allies, or potential allies, in Europe.

In one of his reports the Colonel says: "The Government has been in the habit of paying ruinous prices for the charter of vessels, some of which have been perfectly unseaworthy. The precious lives of officers and men, and public property of the value of millions of dollars, have been entrusted to rotten steamboat hulks, and greedy speculators and middlemen have been paid, for their use, prices of the most extortionate nature."

On one of hundreds of cases investigated, he reports that "by a corrupt conspiracy between a government purchasing agent, an inspector, a Cincinnati contractor, an Indianapolis horse dealer, and Republican politician, the United States had been systematically robbed of one million dollars in the purchase of horses and mules, at the Cincinnati corral, during the preceding year."

But perhaps the star performer in what Henry called "The War's Carnival of Fraud" was the one who first triggered official suspicion-Solomon Kohnstamm. This man's main crime consisted "in his procuring from landlords-generally German saloon-keepers-their signatures to blank vouchers (bills for the board and lodging of recruits for volunteer regiments). These blank vouchers he would have filled in by his clerks for, say, one or two thousand dollars each, and then either get unprincipled commissioned officers to append their certificates for an agreed price, or, cheaper still, forge them. By this device he drew over three hundred thousand dollars from the Mustering and Disbursing Office in New York, of which sum the greater proportion was in due time ascertained by me to be fraud."

But bringing this racketeer to heel was by no means easy. He had for years been a big businessman in the city of New York. He entertained lavishly and bribed liberally. He had many influential friends, some of whom were quite respectable and not aware of his crimes. To make matters worse, through an official blunder, Kohnstamm had been arrested prematurely, before the Colonel could gather all the necessary evidence. Loud voices of protest were raised among the public, and pressures from the contractor's friends and certain political groups were brought to bear. Before long it came to Henry's ears from a reliable source that he, the United States Marshal, and even the Secretary of War were to be "indicted for resisting the writ of habeas corpus under the alleged unconstitutional act of Congress suspending the same."

It was a situation that called for bold action without delay. Olcott took the initiative and went before a grand jury with his papers, answering any questions they cared to ask. "The result was a vote of commendation for what had been done, and all danger of indictment was removed." Then, with his newspaper experience standing him in good stead, he made a bid for better public and press relations. He invited the journalists to a conference, and gave them an outline of the facts that had so far been revealed by his investigations. The newspaper stories next day caused a sensation. Public sympathy was immediately enlisted for the work he was doing. Never afterwards, he said, did the press interfere with the discharge of his official labors, so that he was able to carry out his duties with the efficiency and secrecy required.

Finally, forty-eight bills of indictment were brought against Kohnstamm. Political pressures were overcome, the contractor was brought to trial, and in May 1864, he was sentenced to ten years with hard labor at Sing Sing prison. The out come so pleased the Secretary of War that he sent the following telegram to his Special Investigator;

                      WAR DEPARTMENT, May 21st., 1864
To: Colonel H. S. Olcott, New York:
          I heartily congratulate you upon the result of today's trial. It is as important to the Government as the winning of a battle.
          Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of War.

Henry's Herculean labors in what he called "cleaning out the Augean stables" of the Army were so successful and so gratifying to the authorities that, after about fifteen months as Special Commissioner for the War Department, he was asked by Secretary of the Navy Welles to perform similar services for that department. Stanton agreed to loan. the Colonel temporarily. So he was officially commissioned as Special Investigator for the Navy.

He found the same abuses, the same corruption, the same systematic robbery of the Navy Department, as he had uncovered in connection with the Army. He set himself to clean out this Augean stable, too - "without fear or favor." The rank, position, or power of the wrongdoer meant nothing whatever to Henry Olcott. And so the flow of anonymous threatening letters increased. Indeed, his life was frequently in danger from those whose rackets he was bent on exposing.

At the same time tragedy entered his domestic life. A third son, named Henry Steel, died at the age of four months while the Colonel was busy fighting his grim battle against the ring of rogues who were fleecing the Navy of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Some of them were the same crooked contractors whose scent he had caught behind the scenes in Army affairs. With untiring energy he traveled from state to state as required. (In one semi-annual report he states that during the preceding six months he had traveled over 19,000 miles and examined, with the help of his assistants, 817 witnesses.)

On the evening of April 14, 1865, while the Colonel was working late at his office in New York, a tragic event that staggered the North took place in Ford's Theatre, Washington. As the audience quietly watched the drama, Our American Cousin, John Wilkes Booth, well-known as an actor (though not in this cast) leaped from a box above onto the stage. He faced the audience and cried, "Sic semper tyrannis." Then dashing through the stage door he mounted a waiting horse and rode off into the darkness.

In the box from which he had jumped, Abraham Lincoln, the wartime President of the United States, lay in his blood, with one of Booth's bullets buried in his brain. This great man and statesman, whose hands had once, like Henry's, held a plough, died that April night as the Civil War, which he had steered to victory, drew toward its close.

The next day Colonel Olcott sent the following telegram to Stanton in Washington:

Hon. E. M. Stanton, Secretary of War,
If Lieutenant-Colonel Morgan or I or any of my employees can serve you and the country in any way, no matter what, or anywhere, we are ready.
                    H. S. Olcott.

The reply came within a couple of hours:

H. S. Olcott, New York.
I desire your services. Come to Washington at once, and bring your force of detectives with you. Answer.
                    Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of War.

The Colonel replied promptly that he would be leaving New York by midnight with such of his men as lived in town. The rest would follow next day.

At Washington Olcott, who had now proved himself to the authorities as a highly efficient and incorruptible investigator, was appointed as one of a three-man commission whose job it was to gather all the evidence that could be found concerning any conspiracy behind the assassination, and to flush out the conspirators. The actual killer, John Booth, was on the run from police and army, like a fox before the hounds. There was little doubt that he would be taken, but none of those in the murder plot must be allowed to escape the net.

During the next fortnight all information about the case, from whatever source, was laid before this committee of investigation, consisting of Olcott and two other colonels.

In his book, The Web of Conspiracy, Theodore Roscoe, an official historian for the U.S. Government, describes some of Olcott's activities during this hectic fortnight of national crisis.

On the day following his arrival in Washington, for instance, the Colonel made the first arrest of a major conspirator, Ned Spangler. He also spent many hours interrogating Mary Suratt who conducted the boardinghouse at which the plotters had held their meetings. Her son, John H. Suratt, was thought to be John Booth's chief accomplice. By this time Henry Olcott had had a great deal of experience in the art of interrogation. A verbatim report of the exchange between him and Mary Suratt is to be found in the United States of America's National Archives, and Theodore Roscoe calls it "an exemplary illustration of 1865 police interrogation technique." That busy first day ended at 11 p.m. when General Augur, Commander of the District of Columbia, "ordered Colonel H. S. Olcott to mount the raid" on the Suratt boardinghouse.

Meantime the "fox" was still on the run. Although General Robert E. Lee of the Confederacy had officially surrendered to General Ulysses Grant of the Union army on April 9th, the armies of the South were still in the field, and John Booth was doing his best to reach them. But he was hampered by damage to his leg, caused apparently in that dramatic jump from the President's box to the stage. Twelve days after the assassination, on April 26th, the "hounds" surrounded the "fox" in a hideout on a farm, and the kill was made. Though why Booth was not taken alive for trial-which may have revealed much that will now remain forever hidden-is one of the strange question marks of history. Soon after this event Colonel Olcott was able to return to his pressing duties in New York.

Mary Suratt was subsequently tried before a military tribunal. The chief witness for the prosecution was a drunken innkeeper named Lloyd, and the case against Mrs. Suratt as an accomplice was very weak. If the Colonel's report on his interrogation of her had been brought forward, the case might have been too weak for a conviction. Anyway the report was not produced at the trial, and the lawyers for the defense did not even know of its existence: For some reason the swift dispatch of Mary Suratt was more important than considerations of justice, let alone mercy. At all events she was convicted and hanged.

After the end of the war Olcott still carried on his special work. There was much unfinished business in bringing miscreants to punishment, also he wanted to devise new methods of procedure to ensure against future abuses in the services. In the Navy Department, for instance, he introduced a new system of bookkeeping calculated to prevent the kind of "carnival of corruption" that he had found during the war. The system was eventually introduced in all the Navy yards on the Atlantic seaboard.

Toward the end of 1865, three years after the beginning of his "fortnight's job," Olcott resigned his commission. His chiefs, in letters of farewell, thanked him for the good work done, and their letters provide many testimonials to the Colonel's honesty, integrity, and moral courage.

Olcott had been given unlimited authority "because he made no mistakes that called for correction and had not committed one single act of dishonesty," stated the Secretary of War.

He had, wrote the Judge-Advocate General of the Army, "been the means of rescuing vast sums of public money from peculators and swindlers for whom the vigor and skillfulness of [his] investigations had been a continual terror." He had done his work with thoroughness, "zeal, ability, and uncompromising faithfulness to duty despite the clamors and calumnies" with which he had been assailed in the interests of crime. The Assistant Secretaries of War and the Navy wrote of him in similar vein.

The Special Counsel and Solicitor of the Navy Department, Mr. W. E. Chandler wrote: "I have never met with a gentleman entrusted with important duties of more capacity, rapidity and reliability." He bore testimony to the Colonel's "entire uprightness and integrity of character. . .," saying that he may well be proud of the fact that he had come through without any assault on his reputation when one considered the "corruption, audacity and power of many villains in high position whom you [Olcott] had prosecuted and punished. . . ."

These yellowing letters in the archives of The Theosophical Society prove to all who care to read them that, after three years down in the mud of fraud and corruption, Henry Olcott, like the mudfish, had come out clean; none of it had stuck to him.

His high reputation and many contacts could undoubtedly have secured him a good government post after his work as a Special Commissioner was over, but perhaps he had had enough of official circles. At any rate he decided to start on an entirely new career.